One of a number of semi-official ‘Christian Identity’ logos. [Source: KingIdentity (.com)]The “Christian Identity” theology, formerly a fairly benign expression of what is known as “British-Israelism” or “Anglo-Israelism,” begins to spread throughout the US and Canada, particularly on the west coasts of these nations. This belief holds that white Americans and Canadians are the real descendants of the Biblical tribes of Israel. In 2003, author Nicole Nichols, an expert on far-right racist and religious groups in America, will define the concept of “Christian Identity” as practiced by many white supremacist and separatist groups. Christian Identity is not an organization, she will write, but an ideology that many organizations have adopted in some form or fashion. Christian Identity “elevates white supremacy and separatism to a Godly ideal,” she will write, calling it “the ideological fuel that fires much of the activity of the racist far right.” According to Christian Identity theology, Jews are neither the “true Israelites” nor the true “chosen people” of God; instead, Christian Identity proponents claim, Jews are descended from an Asiatic people known as the Khazars, who settled near the Black Sea during the Middle Ages. [Nicole Nichols, 2003; Anti-Defamation League, 2005; Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance, 5/30/2006] In 2005, the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance will write, “Followers tend to be involved in political movements opposing gun control, equal rights to gays and lesbians, and militia movements,” and quote Michael Barkun, an expert on radical-right groups, as saying, “This virulent racist and anti-Semitic theology… is prevalent among many right-wing extremist groups and has been called the ‘glue’ of the racist right.” [Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance, 5/30/2006]Beginnings; 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' - In the 1920s, William J. Cameron, editor of the Dearborn Independent weekly newspaper, popularized the anti-Semitic hoax manuscript called “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which purported to detail the “secret teachings” of Judaism, including the planned takeover of the world’s governments, the subjugation of non-Semitic races, and the bizarre, cannibalistic rituals supposedly practiced by Jews. [Anti-Defamation League, 2005]Wesley Swift and 'Mud People' - In the 1940s, a former Methodist minister, Wesley Swift, started his own church, later known as the Church of Jesus Christ Christian. Swift had deep ties to a number of radical right-wing groups including the Ku Klux Klan; Swift and his associates set the stage for the mutation of the Christian Identity into a loosely organized set of virulently anti-Semitic, racist belief systems that will come to be grouped together under the “Christian Identity” rubric. Swift himself taught that only the white race was created in the form of God, while Asian and African races were created from the “beasts of the fields,” and thusly are subhuman creations. In Swift’s version of Genesis, Eve, the wife of the first “true” man Adam, was seduced by The Serpent, who masqeueraded as a white man. Eve bore a son, Cain, who is the actual father of the Jewish people. This reinterpretation, sometimes called the “two-seed” or “seedliner” theory, supports the Christian Identity propensity to demonize Jews, whom Swift and others labeled the “spawn of Satan.” Today’s white Europeans and their American and Canadian descendants, Swift taught, are descended from the “true son” of Adam and Eve, Abel, and are the actual “chosen people” of God. Some Christian Identity adherents go even farther, claiming that subhuman “pre-Adamic” races existed and “spawned” the non-white races of the world, which they label “mud people.” [Nicole Nichols, 2003; Anti-Defamation League, 2005]Permeates Racist, Far-Right Groups - By the 1960s, a new group of Christian Identity leaders emerges to spread the Identity theology through the radical, racist right in America and Canada, popularizing the once-obscure ideology. Most prominent among them are three disciples of Swift: James K. Warner, William Potter Gale, and Richard Butler. Warner, who will move to Louisiana and play a leading role in the fight against civil rights, founds the Christian Defense League and the New Christian Crusade Church. Gale, an early leader of the Christian Defense League and its paramilitary arm, the California Rangers, goes on to found the Posse Comitatus (see 1969), the group that will help bring about the sovereign citizen movement. Gale will later found the Committee of the States and serve as the “chief of staff” of its “unorganized militia.” Butler moves Swift’s Church of Jesus Christ Christian to Idaho and recasts it as the neo-Nazi group Aryan Nations (see Early 1970s). Under the leadership of Butler, Gale, Warner, and others, Christian Identity soon permeates most of the major far-right movements, including the Klan and a racist “skinhead” organization known as the Hammerskins. It also penetrates many extreme anti-government activist groups. The Anti-Defamation League will write, “The resurgence of right-wing extremism in the 1990s following the Ruby Ridge (see August 31, 1992) and Waco standoffs (see April 19, 1993) further spread Identity beliefs.” [Anti-Defamation League, 2005] Nichols will write: “Christian Identity enclaves provide a trail of safe havens for movement activists, stretching from Hayden Lake in northern Idaho (the Aryan Nations stronghold) to Elohim City on the Oklahoma/Arkansas border (see 1973 and After). Many white supremacists on the run from federal authorities have found shelter and support from Christian Identity followers.” Some organizations such as the Montana Militia are headed by Identity adherents, but do not as a group promote the theology. [Nicole Nichols, 2003; Anti-Defamation League, 2005]Bringing Forth the Apocalypse - Many Christian Identity adherents believe that the Biblical Apocalypse—the end of the world as it is currently known and the final ascendancy of select Christians over all others—is coming soon. Unlike some Christians, Identity adherents do not generally believe in the “rapture,” or the ascendancy of “saved” Christians to Heaven before the Apocalypse ensues; instead, Identity followers believe Jesus Christ will return to Earth only after the time of the “Tribulation,” a great battle between good and evil, which will set the stage for the return of Christ and the final transformation of the world. Identity followers believe it is their duty to prepare for the Apocalypse, and some believe it is their duty to help bring it about. They tend to cast the Apocalypse in racial terms—whites vs. nonwhites. Identity adherents believe that worldly institutions will collapse during the “end times,” and therefore tend to distrust such institutions, making Identity theology appealing to anti-government ideologies of groups such as militia, “Patriot,” and sovereign citizens groups. [Anti-Defamation League, 2005]21st Century Identity - In the 21st century, Christian Identity groups are strongest in the Pacific Northwest of America and Canada, and the US Midwest, though Identity churches can be found throughout the US and in other parts of Canada. Identity churches also exist in, among other nations, Ireland, Great Britain, Australia, and South Africa (see June 25, 2003). The Anti-Defamation League will write: “Yet while spread far it is also spread thin. Estimates of the total number of believers in North America vary from a low of 25,000 to a high of 50,000; the true number is probably closer to the low end of the scale. Given this relatively small following, its extensive penetration of the far right is all the more remarkable.” [Anti-Defamation League, 2005]Identity Violence - Identity adherents commit a number of violent acts, often against government and/or financial institutions, in an outsized proportion to their small numbers. In 1983, Identity adherent Gordon Kahl kills two US Marshals who attempt to arrest him on a parole violation, and kills an Arkansas sheriff before finally being gunned down by authorities (see February 13, 1983 and After). The white supremacist terrorist group The Order (see Late September 1983) contains a number of Identity members, including David Tate, who kills a Missouri Highway Patrol officer while attempting to flee to an Identity survivalist compound (see April 15, 1985). During the 1980s, small Identity groups such as The New Order (or The Order II) and the Arizona Patriots commit bombings and armored car robberies. After the Oklahoma City bombing (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995), Identity minister Willie Ray Lampley attempts a number of bombings (see November 9, 1995). In 1996, the Montana Freeman, led by Identity members, “stands off” federal authorities for 81 days (see March 25, 1996). Between 1996 and 1998, Eric Robert Rudolph, who has connections to Identity ministers such as Nord Davis and Dan Gayman, bombs an Atlanta gay bar (see February 21, 1997), several abortion clinics (see October 14, 1998), and the Atlanta Summer Olympics (see July 27, 1996 and After). In 1999, Identity member and former Aryan Nations security guard Buford Furrow goes on a shooting spree at a Jewish community center in Los Angeles (see August 10, 1999). [Anti-Defamation League, 2005]

A Time magazine profile lambasts the racist, anti-Communist John Birch Society (JBS—see December 2011), in what is many Americans’ first exposure to the group. It delineates the organization’s penchant for secrecy, its domination by its “dictatorial” leader, Robert Welch, and its hardline battle against almost every element of the federal government as “agents of Communism.” Forty to 60 percent of the federal government is controlled by Communism, the JBS believes. Time calls the organization “a tiresome, comic-opera joke” that nonetheless has cells in 35 states and an ever-widening influence. In Wichita, Kansas, JBS student members are trained to inform their cell leaders of “Communist” influences they may detect in their classroom lectures, and the offending teacher is berated by parents. A Wichita businessman who wanted to give a donation to the University of Wichita decided not to donate after being hounded by local JBS members, who wanted the university to fire professors and remove selected books from its library. “My business would be wrecked,” the businessman explains, “if those people got on the phone and kept on yelling that I am a Communist because I give money to the school.” Nashville, Tennessee, JBS members organize community members to verbally attack neighbors whom they suspect of Communist affiliations. JBS’s current priority, Time writes, is to bring about the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren. Welch, who obtained his wealth from his brother’s candymaking business, believes that Social Security and the federal income tax are all part of the “creeping socialism” that is taking over the federal government. He retired from the business in 1957 and founded the JBS shortly thereafter, naming it for a US Navy captain killed by Chinese Communist guerrillas after the end of World War II. Welch’s seminal tract, “The Politician,” accuses President Eisenhower and his brother Milton Eisenhower of being Communist plants, and accuses both men of treason against the nation. [Time, 3/10/1961]

An undated photo of LeRoy Schweitzer. [Source: WorldNews]LeRoy Schweitzer, a crop duster in Montana and Idaho, becomes increasingly frustrated and resentful at what he considers interference by the government. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Schweitzer moves toward becoming an anti-government tax resister. He becomes fascinated by the legal ideology of the Posse Comitatus (see 1969), attends numerous Posse meetings, and has some contacts with members of The Order (see Late September 1983). Schweitzer, well-liked by his neighbors and friends, begins to worry them with his increasing extremism. He helps a friend, Bernard Kuennan, mount a legal defense against charges of letting his dog roam unvaccinated, and the two hammer the judge with questions about the differences between “admiralty” and “common law” (see Fall 2010). He defies police officers who stop him for traffic violations. He moves to Montana, where he refuses to get a license to fly his Cessna crop duster, resulting in federal arrest warrants. His refusal to pay federal taxes causes the IRS to seize his plane in November 1992, his Bozeman, Montana home, and other equipment, and sell it all to pay his $389,000 delinquent tax bill, dating back to the 1970s. Thoroughly radicalized, Schweitzer meets Rodney Owen Skurdal, another legal manipulator. Skurdal is an ex-Marine and Posse Comitatus advocate who, during litigation of a worker’s compensation suit in the 1980s, tells the judge that the federal government lacks the authority to print paper money and demands, fruitlessly, to be paid his compensation in gold bullion. One Wyoming newspaper claims that Skurdal’s extremism begins after he suffers a fractured skull in 1983, the source of the compensation claim; Skurdal’s former wife says after the injury that Skurdal refuses to use a Social Security number or driver’s license. Skurdal, like many in the Posse, is an adherent to the virulently racist Christian Identity belief system (see 1960s and After), and in court filings claims non-whites are “beasts,” and Jews “the children of Satan.” Skurdal routinely intertwines Identity, Posse Comitatus, Biblical, and Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) tenets in his court filings (see 1994). In 1993, the IRS seizes his farm near Roundup, Montana, for back taxes; Skurdal continues to occupy the farm and no local official dares to evict him. In late 1994, Skurdal invites Schweitzer to move in with him; they are joined by Daniel Petersen in early 1995. The three become the nucleus of what will become the Montana Freemen. Skurdal’s farm becomes a headquarters for the nascent organization, with computers, fax machines, laser printers, and satellite dishes going round the clock. The inhabitants post a sign on the edge of the property, reading: “Do Not Enter Private Land of the Sovereign.… The right of Personal Liberty is one of the fundamental rights guaranteed to every citizen, and any unlawful interference with it may be resisted.” Local authorities want to curb the group, but do not want to risk violence and bloodshed. Musselshell County Sheriff G. Paul Smith says: “These people want to be martyrs. I don’t know how far they are willing to carry that.” Moreover, Smith and his small sheriff’s department are outnammed and outgunned. [Mark Pitcavage, 5/6/1996]

A Web graphic opposing the ‘New World Order.’ [Source: Human Symbiose (.org)]In a speech discussing the post-Cold War world, President Bush outlines his vision of a “New World Order.” Bush says: “We stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective—a new world order—can emerge: a new era—freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace.” The Southern Poverty Law Center will later write that many people, particularly white supremacists and separatists, take Bush’s phrase “as a slip of the tongue revealing secret plans to create a one-world government.” [Sweet Liberty, 9/11/1990; Southern Poverty Law Center, 6/2001] In 1995, Michigan gun dealer and right-wing activist Frank Kieltyka will describe the “New World Order” to a Buffalo News reporter. According to Kieltyka, the “New World Order” is backed by the US government and led by, among other organizations, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). “We’re moving towards the Communists,” Kieltyka will warn. The belief in this “New World Order” will be emphasized in coming years in the militia movements and by right-wing publications such as The Spotlight, an openly racist, anti-government newsletter. [Stickney, 1996, pp. 157-158]

The “Aryan Republican Army” (ARA) commits at least 22 bank robberies across America’s Midwest. The ARA is modeled after the violent white supremacist organization The Order (see Late September 1983), which had funded itself primarily through robbing armored trucks. For a time, the group’s headquarters is in Elohim City, Oklahoma (see 1973 and After). The ARA’s leaders claim to be dedicated to the “overthrow of the US government, the extermination of American Jews, and the establishment of an Aryan Republic” on the North American continent. Members are required to read the infamous Turner Diaries (see 1978), a novel depicting the overthrow of the US government by white separatists and the genocide of minorities. The robberies in all secure between $250,000 and $500,000 for the group. Robbery Spree - During the height of their robbery spree, ARA members target a bank about once a month, hitting banks and financial institutions in Iowa, Wisconsin, Missouri, Ohio, Nebraska, Kansas, and Kentucky. Sometimes the robbers dress like construction workers and flee in junk cars bought specifically for the escape. Sometimes they leave fake bombs and smoke grenades to delay pursuit; sometimes they speak in foreign languages to confuse authorities. In a December 1994 heist, one robber wears a Santa Claus suit, shouts “Ho, ho, ho!” to customers, and leaves a bomb tucked in a Santa hat. During a March 1995 robbery, the robbers leave a pipe bomb in an Easter basket. On one occasion the robbers leave a copy of the Declaration of Independence in the ashtray of an abandoned getaway car. Sometimes they wear caps or bandannas bearing the logos of the FBI or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF). On another occasion the robbers buy a getaway car, a Ford Fairlane, in the name of a retired FBI agent who had worked white supremacist cases in the Northwest; on the front seat of this car they leave an article about Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995). When FBI agent Jim Nelson takes his speculations about the ARA public, group members send letters to several Midwestern newspapers mocking him and calling themselves the “Mid-Western Bank Bandits.” Arrests and Convictions - By late 1995, federal and state authorities will arrest most ARA members; ARA leader Peter Kevin Langan will be convicted on multiple charges of bank robbery, and another ARA leader, Richard Guthrie, will commit suicide in prison after cooperating with authorities. Michael William Brescia and Kevin William McCarthy also cooperate with authorities in return for reduced sentences. Others convicted include Mark William Thomas and Scott Stedeford. Promotional Video Gives Principles - In a two-hour promotional video made in January 1995 and called “The Armed Struggle Underground,” Langan, calling himself “Commander Pedro,” appears in a ski mask alongside others in fatigues brandishing weapons and fistfuls of cash. In the video, Langan says: “Our basic goal is to set up an Aryan republic.… Don’t mistake us for cultists. We, ladies and gentlemen, are your neighbors.” Langan also says the ARA supports “ethnic cleansing” similar to what the Serbians are carrying out in Kosovo. Another ARA member tells viewers that ARA intends to declare war on the American government and promises a “courthouse massacre.” In the video, ARA members state their principles: all racial minorities are subhuman, Jews are “Satan’s spawn,” whites of northern European descent are “chosen people,” and a United Nations-led “New World Order” (see September 11, 1990) threatens freedom in the United States. [Philadelphia Inquirer, 2/4/1997; Anti-Defamation League, 8/9/2002; Nicole Nichols, 2003; Nicole Nichols, 2003; New American, 11/28/2005]Oklahoma City Bomber a Member - In 2001, the FBI will state that McVeigh was an ARA member. It is possible that money “laundered” by him shortly before the bombing (see November 1994) came from an ARA bank robbery. [Nicole Nichols, 2003]

An image of a fraudulent ‘Freeman check’ signed by LeRoy Schweitzer. [Source: Anti-Defamation League]During this time period, over a dozen Montana anti-government tax resisters—the kernel of what will become the “Montana Freemen” movement (see 1983-1995)—establish themselves, creating what they term “common law courts” in Garfield and Musselshell Counties, and mounting a massive bank fraud scheme. [Billings Gazette, 3/25/2006]Beliefs - According to a Washington Post article, the Freemen espouse a number of beliefs that directly contradict federal, state, and local laws. These are: All forms of organized government are illegitimate and have no right to perform duties routinely assigned to governments, from collecting taxes to requiring automobile licenses. Thusly, the Freemen can perform a multitude of actions, such as defying foreclosures, issuing arrest warrants, and even putting government officials on “trial.” They can also act as their own central banks and defraud the government, financial institutions, and area merchants. Racist 'Christian Identity' Ideology - According to the Montana Human Rights Network and local citizens, most of the Freemen espouse some form of “Christian Identity” religious ideology, which claims that whites are inherently superior to other “inferior” races (see 1960s and After); they also hold radical anti-government views. [Washington Post, 4/1996; Washington Post, 4/9/1996; Billings Gazette, 3/25/2006] The Anti-Defamation League traces the roots of the Freemen ideology to the the Posse Comitatus movement (see 1969). [Mark Pitcavage, 5/6/1996] They call themselves “Freemen” because, in their view, white Christian males have special “Freemen” citizenship status, while non-whites, non-Christians, and women have second class status or worse. Freemen are above government prosecution and taxation. As US currency has no intrinsic value, any loans taken by Freemen need not be repaid. The US government is run by Jews and therefore has no legitimacy. “Common law” is the rule of the land. [New York Times, 6/15/1996] The Reverend Jerry Walters of Roundup, Montana, will later characterize the Freemen’s beliefs as a “bizarre distortion of the Christianity taught in most churches on Sundays.” (Rodney Skurdal will file a $100 billion lien against Walters after Walters refuses to alter his sermons to reflect Skurdal’s Christian Identity beliefs.) The Post will observe: “American history is littered with examples of how hard economic times produce hard-edged political splinter groups, but the Freemen of Montana are a particularly virulent strain. Their philosophy, a hodgepodge drawn from the Old Testament, the Magna Carta, the anti-tax Posse Comitatus of the 1980s, and a highly selective reading of the Constitution, is laced with racism and talk of a Jewish conspiracy, and puts them at the extreme of the Christian patriot movement.” Steven Gardner of the Coalition for Human Dignity will say: “The Freemen have, in effect, appointed themselves judge, jury and executioner. They are trying to form their own shadow government for a white Christian republic.” [Washington Post, 4/1996; Washington Post, 4/9/1996; Mark Pitcavage, 5/6/1996; Billings Gazette, 3/25/2006] “What’s driving them is their biblical and theological agenda,” Walters will say. “Their anti-government conspiracy theories, their anti-tax stance—they’re looking at these things through the lens of Christian Identity.” [Washington Post, 4/9/1996]Fraudulent Liens - LeRoy Schweitzer and the others concoct a scheme to generate money by filing phony liens against various Montana property owners, or the Montana or US government. The liens have no value; however, once they are created, it takes time for bank computers to recognize them as invalid. During that “window” of time, the liens can be used to generate money transfers from unsuspecting banks. The Freemen file the liens and deposit fake money orders at other banks to be drawn upon the bank listing the lien. The money orders are usually signed by Schweitzer, though Skurdal, Daniel Petersen, and William Stanton (see October 17, 1994) also sign them on occasion. The money orders look quite official, though sometimes they deliberately spell the words “United States” with a lowercase “u.” The Freemen also issue bogus checks labeled “Certified Bankers Check—Controller Warrant,” instead of a bank name, along with account and lien numbers. Many checks are drawn against a non-existent account in a Butte, Montana, branch of the Norwest Bank. The checks state that they are also redeemable at the Office of the US Postmaster. The scheme is, on the whole, quite profitable. The Freemen also sell the money orders, advertising them to their fellow citizens as a quick means of getting out of debt. One distributor explains on a Web site: “LeRoy Schweitzer does have their [sic] own monetary system. When you attend their course on location, they will issue you CHECKS times two (biblical) to pay off all IRS debts and all loans to banks for no charge. They are having success in this area, but it is hard fight [sic].” One Omaha, Nebraska, county treasurer will later explain, “People see these and, if you’re a very unsuspecting person, they really do look authentic.” [Mark Pitcavage, 5/6/1996] Schweitzer, Skurdal, and Petersen are influenced by Roy Schwasinger, described by federal authorities as a right-wing con artist and head of the Colorado extremist group “We the People.” Schwasinger originated the financial schemes that the Freemen run. [New York Times, 6/15/1996]Appointing Themselves as Legal Officials - The Freemen appoint themselves “justices,” issue “arrest warrants,” and flood local courts and counties with what the Billings Gazette will term “bogus documents.” One of the documents, written by the three Freemen leaders, Skurdal, Schweitzer, and Petersen, is interpreted by local law enforcement officials as a threat. It states: “We the Honorable justices, will not hesitate to use our Lawful force by whatever means necessary to fully support, protect, guarantee, and defend our (common) Law… and… Right of self governing as a free sovereign and independent state.” District Court Judge Peter Rapkoch calls the documents “a bucket of snakes.” In July 1994, one of the Freemen, Skurdal, is prohibited by court order from filing or recording any “frivolous” document with any Montana county clerk of court, clerk and recorder, or the secretary of state (see 1994); Montana Supreme Court Chief Justice Jean A. Turnage calls Skurdal’s filings “not only nonsensical but meritless, frivolous, vexatious, and wasteful of the limited time and resources of this court, of the clerk of this court, and of the various public officials and counsel that are forced to deal with and respond to Mr. Skurdal’s abuse.” Garfield County prosecutor Nick Murnion files misdemeanor charges of impersonating public officials against 13 residents and a felony charge of solicitation of kidnapping against Ralph Clark for a $1 million bounty posted around the county for court officers, the sheriff, and Murnion. Garfield County Sheriff Charles Phipps organizes a posse of about 90 local residents to come to the aid of his outmanned, outgunned three-person department (see January 1994). Murnion eventually files felony criminal syndicalism charges against Freemen members. US Attorney Sherry Matteucci works with local and state officials to share information on anti-government activities. “I think their purpose is to intimidate people and to cause chaos in governmental operations,” she says. [Washington Post, 4/9/1996; Chicago Tribune, 4/19/1996; Mark Pitcavage, 5/6/1996; Billings Gazette, 3/25/2006]

Michael Fortier. [Source: Indianapolis Star]Future Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995) travels to Kingman, Arizona, to move in with his old Army friend Michael Fortier (see March 24, 1988 - Late 1990, November 1991 - Summer 1992, and March 1993) in Fortier’s trailer home, where he tells Fortier he intends to carry out some unnamed violent action against the government in response to the Branch Davidian tragedy (see April 19, 1993 and After). McVeigh briefly works as a security guard for State Security. Fortier will later recall, “I thought he was still in the Army when he showed up at my door,” noting McVeigh’s tight blond crewcut and his camouflage clothing. “When you saw him, it was like he never left. Actually, I never thought he would leave the service. It was just him.… I have to say McVeigh was a good soldier, a much better soldier than I ever was. His shoes were always spit shined and his clothes always pressed. I would put them on straight out of the dryer.” When they first met in the Army, Fortier will recall, he did not like McVeigh, who is from upstate New York (see 1987-1988). “He had this real New York attitude, real rude and blunt,” Fortier will recall. “He just had no tact.” But, he will continue, “you just got used to his attitude.” Staff Sergeant Albert Warnement, another member of the same company who also sometimes went shooting with McVeigh on the weekends, will later recall, “Fortier was probably his best friend.” Fortier’s mother Irene Fortier has a different recollection of McVeigh, remembering him as “polite and courteous.” McVeigh and Fortier share a dislike of the US government—in the front yard of his trailer, Fortier flies both an American flag and a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag often connected with right-wing militia groups—and a fascination with weaponry. Fortier keeps a half-dozen or more guns in his home, as is commonplace in many northern Arizona homes. McVeigh tells him it is time to take violent action against the US government (see August 21-31, 1992). McVeigh stays in Kingman for around five months, though he soon moves into a rented trailer in the Canyon West Mobile and RV trailer park, and gives Fortier’s address as his residence on an application to rent a private mail box, #206, at the Mail Room (see February - July 1994) under the alias “Tim Tuttle” (see October 12, 1993 - January 1994). He and Fortier discuss forming a militia to fight the “New World Order” (see September 11, 1990), which, they believe, is represented by the government’s fatal assault against the Branch Davidians near Waco, Texas (see April 19, 1993 and April 19, 1993 and After). [New York Times, 5/6/1995; New York Times, 5/21/1995; Stickney, 1996, pp. 151; PBS Frontline, 1/22/1996; Serrano, 1998, pp. 79; Douglas O. Linder, 2001] During the first weeks of his stay at the Fortiers’ home, McVeigh visits his friend Roger Moore, an Arkansas gun dealer (see March 1993). At some time during his stay, he uses methamphetamines, probably obtained from Fortier and in the company of Fortier. He writes his father Bill during this time and asks him not to divulge his address. [PBS Frontline, 1/22/1996] In October 1993, McVeigh leaves Arizona to move in with another Army friend, Terry Nichols (see October 12, 1993 - January 1994).

Rodney Skurdal, a leader of the “Montana Freemen” movement (see 1993-1994), files a 20-page treatise with a Montana court that claims the Freemen are the descendents of the true Anglo-Saxon “chosen people,” and that the land occupied by the United States was promised to them by God. Skurdal, who signs the document “the honorable Justice Rodney O. Skurdal,” writes: “In reading the Bible, one must understand that there are ‘two seed lines’ within Genesis. It is the colored people, and the Jews, who are the descendants of Cain… when We move into a new land, We are to kill the inhabitants of all the other races… nor are We to allow the other races to rule over us.” Skurdal writes extensively of the Freemen’s opposition to governmental rule of any sort, justifying it by referencing his interpretation of Biblical teachings: “We, Israel, must obey God only; not man-made laws by our purported Congress and state legislators and/or the United Nations, under the purported ‘new world order’ i.e., ‘Satan’s laws.’” Skurdal adds that taxes, marriage licenses, driver’s licenses, insurance, electrical inspections, and building permits are all instruments of Satan’s law. He writes that the “land of milk and honey” bequeathed by God to whites is actually the territory now considered the United States, and notes, “If we the white race are God’s chosen people… why are we paying taxes on ‘His land.’” Michael Barkun, a Syracuse University professor and expert on radical Christian ideologies, will call Skurdal’s treatise “pure Christian Identity” (see 1960s and After). This theological claim to land, Barkun will say, goes further than a lot of other Identity adherents do. “What’s unusual here is that this isn’t simply a kind of collective granting of a piece of soil by God to his people, but it’s a kind of literal granting of ownership and control: Because we are his people and this is his land, no one can tell us what to do with it,” Barkun will observe. [Washington Post, 4/9/1996; Chicago Tribune, 4/19/1996] Skurdal has come to the notice of Montana legal authorities before. At one point he had legal actions going simultaneously in every one of Montana’s 56 counties. He has succeeded in getting to the Montana Supreme Court three times over traffic tickets. When the state judiciary ruled that Skurdal’s legal filings were frivolous and could not be accepted without being signed by a lawyer, Skurdal merely mailed his writs and documents to out-of-state agencies, which, assuming the documents were misdelivered, returned them to Montana authorities, where they were filed. After four years of dealing with Skurdal’s legal court cases, Musselshell County Attorney Vicki Knudsen quit her job. One of Skurdal’s filings was a “Citizens Declaration of War” which claimed foreign agents were surreptitiously infesting “the country of Montana.” Another accused county officials of attempting to help institute a New World Order (see September 11, 1990). “Once a court accepts one of these asinine Freemen things,” Knudsen later says, “it’s in the system. Everybody named in it becomes involved [and] has to respond. It’s not funny. It’s not romantic. It’s scary.” Knudsen is referring to the threats issued by Skurdal and his fellow Freemen towards herself and other county officials over their filings. [Mark Pitcavage, 5/6/1996]

Michigan Militia logo. [Source: Michigan Militia]The Michigan Militia is formed by gun shop owner Norm Olson and his friend Ray Southwell. The Michigan Militia will grow to be the nation’s largest militia group, with up to 6,000 members. [Southern Poverty Law Center, 6/2001]

An ad for Fox News by the news organization’s parent company, News Corporation. [Source: Huffington Post]Fox News registers the slogan “fair and balanced” as a trademark for its news and opinion broadcasts. In 2008, authors Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella will note that conservative-slanted Fox News (see October 7, 1996 and December 20, 2004) lives up, in a sense, to its promise of “fair and balanced” news and opinion by “simply inviting liberal guests—not by ensuring that their ideas will receive compatible time.” They will note, “The notion of different amounts of access is important, because we know that in highly controlled settings, mere exposure to signs and symbols produces a preference for them.” Fox disproportionately exposes its audience to conservative messages and arguments more than moderate or liberal ones. As a result, the authors observe, “[a]n audience that gravitates primarily to conservative sources whose message is consistent and repetitive is more susceptible to alternate points of view in approximately equal amounts.” The authors will continue, “Fox’s claim that Fox is unbiased because it is ‘fair and balanced’ is made with a wink and a nod.” They will quote conservative editorialist Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal (see January 20, 2003) and conservative financier Richard Viguerie (see July 2004) to bolster their argument. [CBS News, 8/12/2003; Jamieson and Cappella, 2008, pp. 49]

Two US Senators, Lauch Faircloth (R-NC) and Larry E. Craig (R-ID), ask the Justice Department to explain rumors they have heard from militia groups that federal agents are training at Fort Bliss, Texas, to assault those militia groups. In a letter, Faircloth and Craig ask about Fort Bliss and police training, writing in part, “You are doubtless aware of the concerns being raised in many quarters about what is perceived as the growing militarization of our domestic law enforcement agencies.” When the letter becomes publicly known, aides for both senators will claim that the senators are merely seeking information and concerned only about federal police agencies’ going beyond their normal training. The aides will claim that the letter does not mention the paramilitary groups, and will say neither Faircloth nor Craig support such groups. In a separate letter to Attorney General Janet Reno, Representative Steve Stockman (R-TX) makes the same accusation, saying that he has heard from militia group representatives that “New World Order” agents (see September 11, 1990) were preparing to invade them. Stockman calls these group representatives “reliable sources.” Stockman’s “reliable sources” told him that the assault was scheduled for March 25. It is unclear what Stockman believes had happened to that scheduled assault, which did not take place. Fort Bliss spokesperson Jean Offutt calls the warnings “ridiculous,” and Justice Department officials call them “nonsense.” Stockman, like Faircloth and Craig, says he has no ties to paramilitary groups, a statement that is false (see 10:50 a.m. April 19, 1995 and April 23-24, 1995). [New York Times, 5/2/1995]

The Alfred P. Murrah Building after being bombed. [Source: CBS News]A truck bomb destroys the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people in America’s worst domestic terrorist attack. Timothy McVeigh, later convicted in the bombing, has ideological roots both in the Patriot world and among neo-Nazis like William Pierce, whose novel, The Turner Diaries (see 1978), served as a blueprint for the attack. [Washington Post, 4/20/1995; Southern Poverty Law Center, 6/2001; Clarke, 2004, pp. 127] Initially, many believe that no American set off the bomb, and suspect Islamist terrorists of actually carrying out the bombing (see 10:00 a.m. April 19, 1995 and After). Their suspicions prove groundless. Investigators will find that the bomb is constructed of some 5,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, carried in 20 or so blue plastic 55-gallon barrels arranged inside a rented Ryder truck (see April 15, 1995). The bomb is detonated by a slow-burning safety fuse, most likely lit by hand. The fuse is attached to a much faster-burning detonation cord (“det cord”) which ignites the fertilizer and fuel-oil mixture. [New York Times, 4/27/1995] The Murrah Federal Building houses a number of federal agencies, including offices for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF); the Social Security Administration; the Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Veterans Affairs, and Agriculture departments; and the Secret Service. [Washington Post, 4/20/1995] It encompasses an entire city block, between 5th and 4th Streets and Harvey and Robinson Streets, and features a U-shaped, indented drive on 5th that allows for quick pickup and delivery parking. The entire building’s facade on this side is made of glass, allowing passersby to see into the offices in the building, as well as into the America’s Kids day care center on the second floor, which by this time is filling with children. It is in this driveway that McVeigh parks his truck. [Serrano, 1998, pp. 99-102]Entering the City - McVeigh drives into Oklahoma City, entering around 8:30 a.m. from his overnight stop in Ponca City, Oklahoma; the details reported of his entrance into the city vary (see 7:00 a.m. - 8:35 a.m., April 19, 1995). At 8:55 a.m., a security camera captures the Ryder truck as it heads towards downtown Oklahoma City [Douglas O. Linder, 2006] , a sighting bolstered by three people leaving the building who later say they saw the truck parked in front of the Murrah Building around this time. At 8:57, a security camera captures an image of McVeigh’s Ryder truck being parked outside the Murrah Building in a handicapped zone. One survivor of the blast, Marine recruiter Michael Norfleet, later recalls seeing the Ryder truck parked just outside the building next to the little circle drive on 5th Street leading up to the main entrance of the building. Norfleet had parked his black Ford Ranger in front of the Ryder. McVeigh Lights Fuses - McVeigh drives the Ryder truck west past the Murrah Building on NW Fourth Street, turns north on a one-way street, and turns right on Fifth Street. He pulls the truck over and parks near the Firestone store, next to a chain-link fence. He then lights the five-minute fuses from inside the cab (see 8:15 a.m. and After, April 18, 1995), sets the parking brake, drops the key behind the seat, opens the door, locks the truck, exits, and shuts the door behind him. A man later claims to have hit his brakes to avoid someone matching McVeigh’s description as he crossed Fifth Street around 9:00 a.m. McVeigh walks quickly toward a nearby YMCA building where he has hidden his getaway car, a battered yellow Mercury Marquis (see April 13, 1995), in the adjoining alleyway, crossing Robinson Street and crossing another street to get to the alleyway. He begins to jog as he approaches his car. He later says he remembers a woman looking at him as she is walking down the steps to enter the building; he will describe her as white, in her mid-30s, with dirty blonde hair. According to McVeigh’s own recollection, he is about 20 feet into the alley when the bomb goes off. [Stickney, 1996, pp. 184-185; PBS Frontline, 1/22/1996; Serrano, 1998, pp. 158; Douglas O. Linder, 2006; The Oklahoman, 4/2009]Truck Explodes - At 9:02 a.m., the truck explodes, destroying most of the Murrah Building and seriously damaging many nearby buildings. Eventually, it will be determined that 168 people die in the blast, including 19 children. Over 500 are injured. The children are in the second-story day care center just above the parking space where McVeigh leaves the Ryder truck. McVeigh will later tell his biographers that he is lifted off his feet by the power of the blast. Devastation and Death - When the bomb detonates, the day care center and the children plummet into the basement. The building, constructed with large glass windows, collapses, sending a wave of flying glass shards and debris into the building and the surrounding area. The oldest victim is 73-year-old Charles Hurlbert, who has come to the Social Security office on the first floor. Hurlbert’s wife Jean, 67, also dies in the blast. The youngest victim is four-month-old Gabeon Bruce, whose mother is also in the Social Security office. One victim, Rebecca Anderson, is a nurse who runs towards the building to render assistance. She never makes it to the building; she is struck in the head by a piece of falling debris and will die in a hospital four days after the blast. Her heart and kidneys will be transplanted into survivors of the bombing. [Denver Post, 6/3/1997; New York Times, 6/3/1997; Serrano, 1998, pp. 153-154; Oklahoma City Journal Record, 3/29/2001] Sherri Sparks, who has friends still unaccounted for in the building, tells a reporter in the hours after the blast, “Oh, I can’t stand the thought of… those innocent children, sitting there playing, thinking they’re safe, and then this happens.” The explosion leaves a 30-foot-wide, 8-foot-deep crater in the street that is covered by the wreckage of the building’s upper floors. The north face of the nine-story building collapses entirely. [Washington Post, 4/20/1995; Washington Post, 4/22/1995] Mary Heath, a psychologist who works about 20 blocks from the Murrah Building, says the blast “shook the daylights out of things—it scared us to death. We felt the windows shake before we heard the noise.” In a neighboring building, a Water Resources Board meeting is just commencing; the audiotape of the meeting captures the sound of the blast (see 9:02 a.m. and After, April 19, 1995). [Washington Post, 4/20/1995; The Oklahoman, 4/2009] Norfleet, trapped in the Marine Corps office, is thrown into a wall by the explosion. His skull is fractured, and a shard of glass punctures his right eye. Three separate arteries are pierced, and Norfleet begins bleeding heavily. Two supply sergeants in the office are far less injured; Norfleet asks one, “How bad am I hurt?” and one replies, “Sir, you look really bad.” One of the two begins giving Norfleet first aid; Norfleet later recalls: “He immediately went into combat mode and started taking care of me. He laid me on a table and he started looking for bandages to administer first aid. And while I was laying on that table, I just knew that I was losing strength and that if I stayed in the building, I would die.” Norfleet wraps a shirt around his head and face to slow the bleeding, and the two sergeants help him to the stairs, through the fallen rubble, and eventually out. Norfleet will later say that he follows “a blood trail of somebody that had gone down the steps before me” to get outside, where he is quickly put into an ambulance. He loses almost half his body’s blood supply and his right eye. He will never fly again, and will soon be discharged for medical incapacity. [Serrano, 1998, pp. 161-162] Eighteen-month-old Phillip Allen, called “P.J.” by his parents, miraculously survives the blast. The floor gives way beneath him and he plunges 18 feet to land on the stomach of an adult worker on the floor below, Calvin Johnson. Landing on Johnson’s stomach saves P.J.‘s life. Johnson is knocked unconscious by the blast and by the impact of the little boy falling on him, but when he awakes, he carries the toddler to safety. P.J.‘s grandfather calls the child “Oklahoma’s miracle kid,” and media reports use the label when retelling the story of the miraculous rescue. P.J. is one of six children in the day care center to survive the blast. [Stickney, 1996, pp. 275-277] Some people later report their belief that the Murrah Building was rocked by a second explosion just moments after the first one, the second coming from a secure area managed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) that illegally stored explosives. Law professor Douglas O. Linder will later write, “Both seismic evidence and witness testimony supports the ‘two blast theory.’” [Douglas O. Linder, 2006] That theory is later disputed (see After 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995). Explosion's Effects Felt Miles Away - Buildings near the Murrah are also damaged, seven severely, including the Journal Record newspaper building, the offices of Southwestern Bell, the Water Resources Board, an Athenian restaurant, the YMCA, a post office building, and the Regency Tower Hotel. Two Water Resources Board employees and a restaurant worker are killed in the blast. The Journal Record building loses its roof. Assistant Fire Chief Jon Hansen later recalls, “The entire block looked like something out of war-torn Bosnia.” Every building within four blocks of the Murrah suffers some effects. A United Parcel Service truck 10 miles away has its windows shattered by the blast. Cars in parking lots around the area catch fire and burn. Millions of sheets of paper, and an innumerable number of glass shards, shower down for hundreds of feet around the building. [Stickney, 1996, pp. 28-30]Truck Axle Crushes Nearby Car - Richard Nichols (no relation to bomber Timothy McVeigh’s co-conspirator Terry Nichols), a maintenance worker standing with his wife a block and a half away from the Murrah Building, is spun around by the force of the blast. They throw open the back door of their car and begin taking their young nephew Chad Nichols out of the back seat, when Richard sees a large shaft of metal hurtling towards them. The “humongous object… spinning like a boomerang,” as Richard later describes it, hits the front of their Ford Festiva, smashing the windshield, crushing the front end, driving the rear end high into the air, and sending the entire car spinning backwards about 10 feet. Chad is not seriously injured. The metal shaft is the rear axle of the Ryder truck. Later, investigators determine that it weighs 250 pounds and was blown 575 feet from where the truck was parked. Governor Frank Keating (R-OK) points out the axle to reporters when he walks the scene a day or so later, causing some media outlets to incorrectly report that Keating “discovered” the axle. The scene will take investigators days to process for evidence. [Stickney, 1996, pp. 32; New York Times, 6/3/1997; Serrano, 1998, pp. 187-189]First Responders Begin Arriving - Within minutes, survivors begin evacuating the building, and first responders appear on the scene (see 9:02 a.m. - 10:35 a.m. April 19, 1995). McVeigh's Getaway - McVeigh flees the bomb site in his Mercury getaway car (see 9:02 a.m. and After, April 19, 1995), but is captured less than 90 minutes later (see 9:03 a.m. -- 10:17 a.m. April 19, 1995).

The Montana Militia calls newly elected Representative Helen Chenoweth (R-ID) the best friend militia groups have in Congress, according to a report by the New York Times. The Montana Militia’s fall 1994 catalogue sells, among other items, a bomb-making manual, tapes explaining the “one-world government” conspiracy, and a video of a speech made by Chenoweth in late 1993, in which, the catalogue claims, she told listeners over 50 percent of the United States is now under “the control of the New World Order” (see September 11, 1990). She does not use the actual term on the videotape. “We are in a day and age now when we are facing an unlawful government from time to time,” she told listeners. “We are in a battle today that is far more insidious and dangerous as far as conquering our people and our soul than we have ever faced before. Our land has been taken. It’s time we reclaim our land.” The tape is titled “America in Crisis” and is sold along with tapes like “En route to Global Occupation,” which states, “The anti-Christ is not coming—he’s here!” Chenoweth has also made claims of an impending “New World Order” takeover of the United States, and has cited as proof the UN’s designation of Yellowstone National Park as a world heritage site. (The Sierra Club will note: “In real life, the UN label means only that the site has ‘outstanding universal value.’ The regulations under which it was designated were drawn up by Ronald Reagan’s Interior Secretary, James Watt.”) Chenoweth is now under pressure to explain her contacts with militia groups, an issue that did not significantly arise during the 1994 election but was sparked by recent revelations that Representative Steve Stockman (R-TX) received faxes from militia groups in the hours after the Oklahoma City bombings (see 10:50 a.m. April 19, 1995 and April 23-24, 1995). Ken Toole of the Montana Human Rights Network says, “Given what we know about the conspiratorial world view and violent tendencies that are at the core of militia beliefs, for elected officials to be supportive or even neutral does nothing but embolden these people.” In March 1995, Chenoweth issued a press release demanding that the federal government immediately stop sending “black helicopters” filled with armed federal agents to interfere with private citizens’ affairs in her state (see February 15, 1995). Chenoweth, Stockman, and other congressional members who have had militia members as campaign volunteers and have presented militia concerns to the House insist that they are doing nothing more than looking out for their constituents. [New York Times, 5/2/1995; Sierra Magazine, 5/1996]

An “umbrella” militia organization called the Tri-States Militia holds an organizing meeting. Group founder John Parsons, a South Dakota militia figure, tells the assembled militia members, “There is a thunder rolling across this country, and what you’re looking at is the lightning bolt in that thunder.” One of the Tri-States council members is Bradley Glover (see July 4-11, 1997). Part of the meeting is open to the press; Glover tells reporters: “We have two arms. The political side and the military side. We hope the political approach will solve our country’s problems, but if the situation deteriorates to the point where they deny our political efforts then we have the other side.” He tells the reporters that militias are little more than the “original neighborhood watch.” But one attendee at the meeting, recalling Glover’s statements in the portion of the meeting closed to the press, will call him a “crazy and dangerous” person who tried to push others into overt action at the meeting. Glover and other Tri-States members do not know that Parsons is a paid FBI informant who is earning $1,800 a month to run the Tri-States “National Information Center.” After members learn of Parsons’s FBI connections during the bombing conspiracy trial of militia leader Willie Ray Lampley (see November 9, 1995), the organization dissolves, with members accusing each other of a variety of crimes. Alabama militiaman Mike Vanderboegh accuses Glover of being an “agent provocateur,” paid by the government to encourage “patriots” to commit illegal acts and bring law enforcement down upon them. Vanderboegh says Glover “was tossed out of the organization for scaring little old ladies on patriot shortwave with tales of millions of jabbering communists poised to invade from Mexico… his mental health was the subject of intense and frequent debate during his association with Tri-States, and from personal observation I would say that he is either looney tunes or crazy like a fox.… It would be fair to say that he is an unstable personality with paranoid ideations [sic]. He started out with a pretty fair constitutional militia unit in Kansas, but his inherent instability caused most of his troops to vote with their feet to other, more responsible commanders (i.e., non-nutburgers that didn’t propose to START a war). Glover has a serious John Brown complex and has spoken of sparking the second American Civil War. He just can’t seem to figure out where Harper’s Ferry is at.” With his credibility among “mainstream” militia members in question, Glover will begin associating with more radical, violence-prone anti-government extremists. [Mark Pitcavage, 1997]

A New York Times analysis of indicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995, July 11-13, 1995, and August 10, 1995) uses an interview with FBI profiler Jack Douglas to paint a picture of McVeigh as a burgeoning serial killer. Douglas, the model for the FBI analyst in the movie The Silence of the Lambs, describes McVeigh as an underachieving loner whose stunted social development, obsessive neatness, inability to deal with his abandonment by his mother, sexual frustration, obsession with guns, and overarching alienation led him to conceive and execute a plot that killed scores of innocent people. “There are the same kind of characteristics” in McVeigh’s makeup as serial killers possess, Douglas says. “Asocial, asexual, a loner, withdrawn, from a family with problems, strong feelings of inadequacy from early in life, an underachiever.” McVeigh did well in the highly structured environment of the US Army (see March 24, 1988 - Late 1990 and January - March 1991 and After), Douglas notes, but was unable to function successfully outside of that environment (see November 1991 - Summer 1992). His lifelong obsession with guns (see 1987-1988) blended with his increasing fascination with far-right militia, white supremacist, and separatist ideologies that led him to believe the government was actively plotting to disarm and repress its citizenry. McVeigh, always fascinated with computers, used the burgeoning network of computerized bulletin boards, email clients, videotape exchanges, shortwave radio broadcasts, and other information resources to fuel his beliefs, all codified in what Times reporter John Kifner calls “a venomous novel called The Turner Diaries” (see 1978) that depicts rebel white supremacists overthrowing the federal government and committing genocide against minority citizens. Apocalyptic World View Triggered by Events - McVeigh’s increasingly apocalyptic world view, Douglas says, led him to carry out the bomb plot, perhaps in an effort to bring about the same supremacist rebellion that The Turner Diaries depicts. The federal raids on Randy Weaver’s cabin in Ruby Ridge, Idaho (see August 31, 1992), and the Branch Davidian compound in Texas (see April 19, 1993), the passage of the Brady gun control bill (see November 30, 1993), and the birth of the paramilitary militia movement (see August 1994 - March 1995) all spurred McVeigh forward. Kifner writes: “The paramilitary movement vowed to resist the government and publish manuals on forming underground guerrilla squads. Mr. McVeigh was just a little ahead of the curve.” The final straw for McVeigh, Kifner and Douglas theorize, was the passage of the August 1994 crime bill that outlawed 19 types of semiautomatic assault weapons (see September 13, 1994). Shortly thereafter, McVeigh wrote an angry letter to his friend Michael Fortier alerting him that he intended to take some sort of “positive action” against the government (see September 13, 1994). Shared Inadequacies - Douglas calls McVeigh’s “obsession with weapons” an “overcompensation for deep-rooted feelings of inadequacy.… They compensate for a while by talking the talk, but after a while they have to go out and do something about it. Typically the time for violence is in the mid-20s. They look in the mirror and see they’re going nowhere fast. This is an easily controlled and manipulated personality. They are looking for something to hang their hat on, some ideology. They have difficulty fitting into groups, but they are more mission-oriented, more focused.” Seattle forensic psychiatrist Kenneth Muscatel has called this type of personality disorder “Smerdyakov syndrome,” after the scorned half-brother in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, who listens to the other brothers inveigh against their father until, finally, he murders the father. Douglas notes the devoted friendship between McVeigh and indicted co-conspirator Terry Nichols, another underachieving loner who did well in the Army. “These two are birds of a feather,” Douglas says. “Each feeds off the other’s inadequacies.” Of McVeigh, Douglas says: “These people are comfortable in a structured environment, they do very well. But outside of a structured environment, without that rigidity, he just can’t survive. On the other hand, he’s probably doing fine now in jail. I bet they would say he’s a model prisoner.” 'Red Dawn' and the Militia Movement - McVeigh’s favorite movie is, by all accounts, a 1984 film called Red Dawn that depicts a group of Texas high school football players banding together to defeat an invasion of Soviet paratroopers. The “Wolverines,” as the footballers term themselves, transform themselves into a polished, lethal guerrilla force. The film contains a number of tropes that resonate with McVeigh and other militia sympathizers: the use of gun-registration forms to enable the Soviet invasion, political leaders eager to betray the American citizenry they represent, and others. The film is a cult classic among militia members. Along with another extraordinarily popular series of movies, the Rambo films, Red Dawn expresses what sociologist James William Gibson has noted is a new perspective on military veterans and popular culture; whereas traditional war movies show raw recruits uniting to battle an evil enemy on behalf of a just national cause, post-Vietnam movies such as Red Dawn and the Rambo films popularize the archetype of an alienated loner or small band of outlaws, betrayed by their own government and fighting for their view of the American ideal as renegades. Another favorite film of McVeigh’s is a very different offering, the 1985 black comedy Brazil, which depicts an Orwellian future dominated by an all-powerful bureaucracy. Actor Robert DeNiro plays a commando-like “outlaw repairman”; his character’s name is “Tuttle,” one of the aliases used by McVeigh (see April 19, 1993 and After, October 12, 1993 - January 1994, December 1993, February - July 1994, and May 12, 1995). The last movie McVeigh rented before the Oklahoma City bombing was Blown Away, the tale of a mad bomber. 'The Turner Diaries', Gun Regulation, and the Militia Movement - Kifner notes that much has been made of McVeigh’s fascination with William Pierce’s novel The Turner Diaries. McVeigh was an avid reader, paging through mercenary and gun magazines, white supremacist and anti-Semitic newsletters and fliers, and an array of apocalyptic and war novels. One of the more unusual works found in McVeigh’s possessions is a document titled “Operation Vampire Killer 2000,” written by militia leader Jack McLamb and predicting a “globalist,” “New World Order” (see September 11, 1990) takeover of the US by “the year 2000.” The document names the plotters against American democracy as, among others, the Order of the Illuminati, international bankers, the United Nations, the “Rothschild Dynasty,” the Internal Revenue Service, CBS News, Communists, the Yale secret society Skull and Bones, “humanist wackos,” and, possibly, aliens from outer space in Unidentified Flying Objects. McLamb writes: “For the World Elite to truly enjoy their ‘utopian’ Socialist Society, the subject masses must not have the means to protect themselves against more ‘voluntary compliance.’ When one grasps this logical position, there is no longer any question about it: THE GUNS WILL HAVE TO GO.” But The Turner Diaries was, according to one person involved in the investigation, McVeigh’s “Bible” (see August 20, 1995). As with so much of McVeigh’s reading material, Turner posited the forcible confiscation of citizen-owned guns by the US government as the presage to tyranny. In a book on the paramilitary movement, Kenneth Stern wrote: “Those who would regulate guns were cast as tyrants who were coming for people’s guns first. The government had to disarm citizens in order to subjugate them. The United Nations could march in and take over America; loyal Americans could be sent to concentration camps.” Both McVeigh and the paramilitary movement were “developing in the same time line,” Stern tells Kifner. “I would date the first functioning militia as February of 1994 in Montana, and then spreading to Michigan and other places” (see October 12, 1993 - January 1994). McVeigh and Nichols were apparently influenced by the writings of former Ku Klux Klan leader Louis Beam, who advocated a “leaderless resistance” of tiny, independent cells that “state tyranny” would find more difficult to control (see February 1992). “No one need issue an order to anyone,” Beam wrotes. “These idealists truly committed to the cause of freedom will act when they feel the time is ripe, or will take their cues from others who proceed them.” In Pierce’s novel, a bombing almost exactly like the Oklahoma City blast is carried out by the novel’s hero Earl Turner; the novel’s bombing destroys the FBI headquarters in Washington and inspires a nationwide revolt by white supremacists against the “tyrannical” government. It is conceivable, Kifner concludes, that McVeigh’s bomb was intended to strike the same sort of blow, and perhaps evoke the same results. [New York Times, 12/31/1995]

Norm Olson. Olson is wearing an ‘Alaska Citizens’ Militia’ shoulder patch as part of his pseudo-military garb. [Source: Political Carnival]Former Michigan Militia members Norm Olson and Ray Southwell concoct the idea of holding a “Third Continental Congress” to redress the problems they see plaguing the nation—problems they believe stem primarily from a conspiracy of Jews, liberals, and minorities to repress white Christians. Olson and Southwell were thrown out of the Michigan Militia after Olson told media representatives that the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995) was engineered by the Japanese government in retaliation for the CIA’s supposed involvement in the Tokyo subway gas attack. Southwell envisions the Third Continental Congress, or TCC, to operate as a directing body for all the nation’s various militia groups, working together under the TCC rubric to “reestablish justice in America for all the people, whatever color they may be, or whatever faith system they may observe.” Southwell calls the envisioned dominance of the TCC “God’s will.” Olson says: “My goal is not to plan a revolution, for revolution will come. My goal is not to point fingers, lay blame, or find fault, for few doubt the crimes of the present de facto government. My goal is not to cast support to politicians or to shore up the broken machine that the federal government has become. Rather, my goal is to establish the Republican Provisional Government.” The first official TCC meeting, held in October 1996 in a Kansas City, Missouri, Holiday Inn, only attracts about a dozen delegates due to bad weather, though a few more arrive as the meeting wears on. Attendees include Sarah Lowe, whose husband currently heads the white separatist “Republic of Texas,” and Texas conspiracist James Vallaster. Southwell issues a manifesto calling for a Continental Defense Force, a repackaging of his original Third Continental Congress idea. The next meeting of the TCC occurs in January 1997 in Independence, Missouri, with nothing concrete being determined. Some TCC delegates, impatient with the inaction, decide among themselves to take some sort of decisive action. Several delegates, including Ronald Griesacker (a corrections officer, a well-known figure among militias, and a former Republic of Texas member), Kevin and Terry Hobeck (owners of an Ohio trucking firm), and Dennis and Ardith Fick, decide to form their own Continental Congress, which reportedly meets in Silver Lake, Indiana, in February 1997. One of this splinter group’s first members is Bradley Glover (see October 1995 and After), a Kansas militia member looking for extremist groups with an eye to violence. Other members include Thomas and Kimberly Newman, Michael Dorsett (a tax dodger and “common law” advocate), Merlon “Butch” Lingenfelter Jr. (a Wisconsin dairy farmer whose family believes a vast Jewish conspiracy runs most of Western civilization—see 1986), and, unbeknownst to the other members, several undercover officers of the Missouri State Highway Patrol, who were at the January 1997 TCC meeting and were concerned about the radical statements of some of the splinter group’s members. In April 1997, the splinter members meet in Towanda, Kansas. Glover and Dorsett make increasingly fiery statements, impelling some of the other members to leave. The focus of the meeting turns to the idea of foreign, United Nations-led troops being housed at US military bases, presumably to help the US government crush the “patriot” militia movement and impose martial law. Later that year, Mark Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League will write: “Allegations of such troops had been made so often and with such confidence in the patriot community that their presence was taken for granted by many patriots. Radio broadcaster Mark Koernke regularly spoke of hundreds of thousands of UN soldiers hiding in the United States, at military installations, in the national parks, and elsewhere. Indeed, the New World Order (see September 11, 1990) hardly seemed to bother with the effort of hiding them any longer.” The members that remain decide to take action. They determine to develop an arsenal of weapons and military equipment with which to attack government installations that are presumed to house foreign troops. They will hide in safe locations. The Hobecks sell their trucking firm to provide cash for the group, and travel to Colorado to establish a “base” at the Thirty Mile Resort in the Rio Grande National Forest. Others stage reconnaissance missions on military bases, including Holloman Air Force Base at Alamagordo, New Mexico. They station guards during the April and May 1997 meetings in Towanda, and even arm their children, who help patrol Glover’s farm. In June, Glover moves into Dorsett’s home in Arlington, Texas, in preparation for a strike on Fort Hood (see July 4-11, 1997). [Mark Pitcavage, 1997]

Author Brandon M. Stickney, a reporter for the Lockport Union-Sun & Journal in upstate New York, catalogs a number of unproven and sometimes extremist conspiracy theories that have sprouted in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995). Stickney includes his findings in his “unauthorized biography” of accused bomber Timothy McVeigh (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995, July 11-13, 1995, and August 10, 1995), All-American Monster. Among the theories Stickney presents: The bombing was carried out by the Japanese. This theory was promulgated by Michigan Militia leaders Norm Olson and Ray Southwell (see April 1994), and proved so embarrassing for the two that they resigned their posts. Both the Oklahoma City bombing and the Branch Davidian tragedy (see April 19, 1993 and April 19, 1993 and After) were engineered by Clinton administration personnel in order to kill two former bodyguards of President Clinton who were preparing to go public with lurid tales of Clinton’s sexual transgressions. Secret Service agent Alan Wicher was killed in Oklahoma, and BATF agent Robert William was killed at Waco. Clinton attended Wicher’s funeral, and William had worked for the BATF in Little Rock while Clinton was governor of Arkansas. Idaho resident Bill Trowbridge told an Associated Press reporter after a militia meeting: “[T]hat makes four different bodyguards killed. Three in Waco, and this one. Sure did benefit Bill Clinton, didn’t it? Check that out.” The UN participated in the bombing plot. This theory has been promoted by the John Birch Society (see March 10, 1961 and December 2011), the editors of the white-separatist magazine The Spotlight, and other organizations and groups that have warned about a partnership between the UN and the US government to impose tyranny and martial law on American citizens, as part of the imposition of what they call the “New World Order” (see September 11, 1990). Gate Keepers information service representative Pam Beesley told an AP reporter that “this is what the UN does when they go in and overthrow a country. They produce unrest in the country first.” The bomb was an “electrodynamic gaseous fuel device” impossible for amateurs like McVeigh and his accomplice Terry Nichols to have made. Instead, it must have been made by US officials possessed of “high-level, top-secret” information. This theory came from former FBI agent Ted Gunderson, who makes regular appearances in The Spotlight. According to Gunderson, “John Doe No. 2” (see April 20, 1995, April 21, 1995, April 29, 1995, and June 14, 1995) was “vaporized by design” in the blast, and McVeigh was a “throwaway” or an “expendable asset.” Two bombs, not one, destroyed the Murrah Federal Building. It is true that two “incidents” were recorded at 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, 11.9 seconds apart, but, according to Oklahoma chief geophysicist James Lawson, the second tremor was not caused by a second bomb, but by the building collapsing (see After 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995). Lawson told the AP he still gets calls from people demanding to know about the “second explosion.” “A lot of them are anxious to explain to me that our government committed mass murder,” he said. “They are disappointed that I’m not saying it was two blasts.” Stickney writes that many people have told him flatly that “they know” the government caused the bombing, and writes: “No matter what I told them, or for how long I tried to tell it, they would not change their minds that the government was involved. Distrust in public officials has reached the point of delusion, where Americans create their own explanations they cannot understand. One of the people who spoke with me went so far as to say he’d obtained a photograph of the bombed-out Murrah (ordered through a late-night AM radio show) that ‘proves two bombs were set off. McVeigh was led to Oklahoma by his nose, by the government.’” A video titled Oklahoma City: What Really Happened sells well at gun shows and through militia magazines and Web sites. On the box, it poses the questions: “Was there more than one bomb?” “What happened to John Doe No. 2?” “Was there a Middle Eastern connection?” and “Did some occupants of the building have prior warning?” [Stickney, 1996, pp. 265-267]

Entrance to Fort Hood, Texas. [Source: New York Times]Fort Hood, Texas, preparing for the annual “Freedom Fest” Fourth of July celebration, readies itself for a large crowd of local civilians planning to spend the day enjoying fireworks, marathons, concessions, military bands, carnival rides, and community activities. However, anti-government activists Bradley Glover and Michael Dorsett are captured by FBI and Missouri state police officers in Missouri before they can turn the festival into a massacre. Glover and Dorsett have become convinced that the United Nations is housing Communist Chinese troops at the military base, in conjuction with a “New World Order” conspiracy to invade and occupy the United States (see September 11, 1990). Glover, Dorsett, and others—all “splinter” members of an organization calling itself the “Third Continental Congress” (TCC—see Summer 1996 - June 1997)—are planning a multi-pronged attack on the Army base. Soon after, five others are arrested in conjunction with the plot. History of the Fort Hood Plot - Glover and other TCC members believe that the April 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995) was a plot by federal agencies to gin up an excuse to persecute “patriot” organizations. Glover told British reporter Ambrose Evans-Pritchard shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing that “it’s only a matter of time now before the shooting war begins.” He believed that the bombing would be followed by heavy-handed anti-terrrorism legislation that would see federal agencies attempt to violently eradicate militia groups, and in turn, those groups would violently resist. “If this thing goes down,” Glover predicted in May 1995, “there’s going to be an extremely large number of US military that’s coming to our side with their weapons. They’ll turn like a dog on a cat.” He believed the militias would easily defeat the government forces—“We can whip those guys. We can take out the so-called ninja wanna-bes. We’ll beat ‘em quick”—but worries that President Clinton will turn to the Chinese forces he supposedly has housed throughout the United States: “That’s what worries us,” Glover said. “Then we’re gonna be fighting big time.” Glover became known to federal authorities after his frequent interviews with reporters after the Oklahoma City bombing, and claims to lead groups such as the Southern Kansas Regional Militia and the First Kansas Mechanized Infantry. (In his “real” life, Glover is a part-time computer consultant.) When the expected crackdown failed to materialize, Glover became a national council member of a national “umbrella” militia group called the Tri-States Militia (see October 1995 and After) and then began associating with ever-more violent anti-government extremists. Glover, Dorsett, and a small group of extremists devise an extensive plan to strike at a number of government facilities and military bases, beginning with Fort Hood. Arrests - But federal and state authorities are well aware of their plans. At 6:15 a.m. on the morning of July 4, FBI agents arrest Glover and Dorsett in their tents in the Colorado Bend State Park. The two have an arsenal with them: two rifles, five pistols, 1600 rounds of ammunition, bulletproof vests, a smoke grenade, a homemade silencer, explosive material, a night vision scope, and other items. “Their explosives would have been more damaging to the personnel at Fort Hood than to the physical installation,” Missouri State Highway Patrol Lieutenant Richard Coffey later tells a Texas newspaper reporter. “They did not have the same philosophy as the people in Oklahoma City. They were not looking for a huge explosion to make their point.” Instead, they planned small, repeated explosions. Glover, charged only with weapons violations, posts bail and flees to Wisconsin, where he is quickly arrested again after another weapons charge is added to the original indictment. Dorsett is held on an outstanding federal passport violation. Fellow plotter Merlon “Butch” Lingfelter is later arrested in Wisconsin on July 10, while looking for Glover; he surrenders his two machine guns and two pipe bombs, but says, “I’m not trying to be a noble knight in this, but it’s time somebody somewhere does something.” Despite his defiance, Lingenfelter tells a reporter that the meetings held by Glover were merely social outings. Kevin and Terry Hobeck are arrested on July 10 in Colorado after giving two illegal automatic weapons to undercover police officers; Thomas and Kimberly Newman are arrested on July 11 in Kansas after Thomas Newman gives the same undercover officers a sack full of pipe bombs. Suicide Mission? - One law enforcement official believes that the group may have intended to die in the planned Fort Hood attack. “I think you have to have a warped sense of reality to think you can pull of a mission like that,” Missouri State Highway Patrol Captain James Keathley later tells a Denver reporter. “It sounds like a suicide mission to me. I don’t know if they could have pulled this off.” [Mark Pitcavage, 1997; Southern Poverty Law Center, 6/2001]Sentences - Glover will draw a seven-year prison sentence, and the others lesser terms. [Southern Poverty Law Center, 6/2001]

The prosecution in the trial of accused Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995 and November 3, 1997) links Nichols and his alleged co-conspirator, convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh (see June 2, 1997 and June 11-13, 1997), to a rifle stolen from an Arkansas gun dealer, Roger Moore (see November 5, 1994 and Before July 3, 1995). Prosecutors have alleged that Nichols and McVeigh, who planned the robbery, used the proceeds from the robbery to finance the bombing. The link between Nichols and the robbery is made in part by Karen Anderson, Moore’s longtime girlfriend, who says the ornate, custom-made .308-caliber rifle found in Nichols’s Herington, Kansas, home (see 3:15 p.m. and After, April 21-22, 1995) was hers. She says when prosecutors first showed her the rifle, she exclaimed: “It’s my baby!… It was made for me.” Anderson says she has been Moore’s girlfriend for over 20 years, and lives in what is apparently an open relationship with Moore and his wife Carol. Prosecutors say Nichols donned a ski mask and robbed Moore’s gun dealership of more than $60,000 in guns, precious jewels, gold, silver, cash, and other items. Anderson says she recognized several other weapons seized by FBI agents from Nichols’s home. Of one, a shotgun, she says: “I shot a pair of blue jeans with this a couple of times. Jeans with holes cost $100. I figured if you shot them yourself, you could save about $90.” Anderson’s colorful testimony and flamboyant gestures trigger several waves of laughter in the courtroom, including one instance where she apologizes for inadvertently waving a submachine gun at Judge Richard P. Matsch, saying, “I just pointed it at the judge again!” Prosecutor Beth Wilkinson quips in response, “No matter how mad he makes you, don’t fire it.” Anderson says she has a list of the serial numbers of many of the stolen guns; Moore previously told investigators his list of the serial numbers disappeared the day of the robbery. Anderson also discusses her friendship with McVeigh, and says she and Moore were so impressed with McVeigh’s warnings about a United Nations plot to take over the country that they visited several military bases in an unsuccessful search for Russian vehicles. After Anderson testifies, Moore testifies, telling the jury how he was robbed by a man who carried a shotgun, wore a black ski mask, and bound him with duct tape before purloining items from his farm, from which he runs his dealership. He says he was alone on his farm the morning of the robbery, and had just gone outside to feed the animals when he heard a voice say, “Lay on the ground.” He turned and saw “a horrible picture, a man dressed with camouflage, with a black ski mask, carrying a pistol-grip shotgun aimed right at my face.” Attached to the shotgun was a garrote wire that he says could “cut your windpipe and jugular vein.” The robber was a white man wearing what he thinks were Israeli combat boots, Vietnam-era camouflage pants and shirt, and military gloves. Moore says he could see a short beard and suntanned skin through the mouth opening in the mask. He identifies a number of weapons shown to him by prosecution lawyers as being among those stolen from his dealership. Defense lawyer Michael Tigar accuses Moore of conspiring with McVeigh to commit insurance fraud. Tigar asks Moore: “Isn’t it a fact you were not robbed? Isn’t it a fact that you and Mr. McVeigh worked out a plan to get these guns out on the market, and you would collect whatever you could from the insurance company?” Moore angrily responds, “I deny that.” He admits to seeking an insurance settlement even though he had no serial numbers for the stolen weaponry, nor an accurate accounting of the weapons he said had been stolen. He also acknowledges telling investigators differing accounts of the robbery, and engaging in friendly letter exchanges with McVeigh after the robbery, including one letter written by Moore in the days before the bombing that complained of the “New World Order” (see September 11, 1990) and stated, “Plan is to bring the country down and have a few more things happen, then offer the 90 percent a solution (Better Red than Dead).” He also admits to using the alias “Bob Miller” on the gun-show circuit, and admits to previously telling lawyers that he suspected law enforcement agents or militia members of robbing him. However, he says, he also suspected McVeigh of setting him up, and says that the letters were designed to persuade McVeigh to come back to Arkansas so he could question him about the robbery. [New York Times, 11/18/1997; New York Times, 11/19/1997]

FBI Director Louis Freeh, speaking of the possibility of future violence from radical-right militia groups, says: “With the coming of the next millennium, some religious/apocalyptic groups or individuals may turn to violence as they seek to achieve dramatic effects to fulfill their prophecies.… Many white supremacist groups adhere to the Christian Identity belief system (see 1960s and After), which holds that the world is on the verge of a final apocalyptic struggle… and teaches that the white race is the chosen race of God.” Some of these Christian Identity members will commit crimes to prepare for their anticipated Apocalypse, Freeh warns, and says that the US government, Jews, and non-whites are likely targets. [Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance, 5/30/2006] Freeh’s statement anticipates the FBI’s “Project Megiddo” report, which will focus on the possibility of a wave of domestic terrorism coinciding with the “end of the millennium” (see October 20, 1999).

The FBI releases its report on what it calls “Project Megiddo,” an examination of what it calls “the potential for extremist criminal activity in the United States by individuals or domestic groups who attach special significance to the year 2000.” The report is released to law enforcement agencies throughout the country, but not to the public. A statement accompanying the report reads in part: “The threat posed by extremists as a result of perceived events associated with the year 2000 (Y2K) is very real. The volatile mix of apocalyptic religious and [New World Order] conspiracy theories (see February 4, 1999) may produce violent acts aimed at precipitating the end of the world as prophesied in the Bible.” The report is based on nine months of intelligence and data collection by the domestic terrorism unit of the FBI. Soon after its release, the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR) will obtain a copy and release it on the Internet. The report’s executive summary notes that “Megiddo,” a hill in northern Israel, is the site of a number of Biblical-era battles, and the Hebrew word “armageddon” derives from a Hebrew phrase meaning “hill of Megiddo.” The Bible’s depiction of “Armageddon” is, the report states, “the assembly point in the apocalyptic setting of God’s final and conclusive battle against evil. The name ‘Megiddo’ is an apt title for a project that analyzes those who believe the year 2000 will usher in the end of the world and who are willing to perpetrate acts of violence to bring that end about.” While much of the media-fueled debate about the upcoming “end of the millennium” focuses on technological issues, such as the anticipated widespread disabling of computer networks and the like, the FBI report focuses more specifically on the religious connotations of the time as viewed by far-right “Christian Identity” (see 1960s and After) and related white supremacist, separatist, and militia organizations. The report, the summary states, “is intended to analyze the potential for extremist criminal activity in the United States by individuals or domestic extremist groups who profess an apocalyptic view of the millennium or attach special significance to the year 2000.” It is difficult to say what groups may pose a threat as 1999 comes to a close, the report states, as it is difficult to anticipate which groups will follow through on their rhetoric and which will not. Moreover, the report notes, many domestic extremist groups are not traditionally structured in a hierarchical fashion; the possibility of “lone wolf” strikes by individuals operating outside a militia or extremist group may in some cases outweigh the likelihood of violent assaults carried out by such groups. The report notes that the worst domestic terrorist event in US history, the Oklahoma City bombing (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995), was carried out by two “lone wolves,” Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. The report finds few indications of what it calls “specific threats to domestic security,” but focuses more on suspicious activities by a variety of militia groups who are arming themselves, stockpiling food, raising money through illegal means, and other actions which may serve as a warning of future violence. Problems caused by “Y2K glitches” such as power outages and computer failures may be interpreted by some extremist groups as the first actions of a government assault on the citizenry, the FBI warns, and may precipitate violent responses. [Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance, 10/1999; Federal Bureau of Investigation, 10/20/1999; Washington Post, 10/31/1999] The right-wing news blog WorldNetDaily will accuse the FBI of issuing the report to “set up” militia groups as patsies for the government’s own terrorist activities (see December 9, 1999).

Around 10,000 people attend the “Center for Preparedness Expo” in Denver to prepare for the imminent “Y2K” collapse of society warned of by many white separatists and “Patriot” movement members (see October 20, 1999 and February 4, 1999). The expo has traveled the country, including a stop in Philadelphia in June. Promoter Dan Chittock says the show offers “practical information for the uncertain times we live in,” but Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center says the expo features what he calls “a queer mix of people interested in organic farming and political extremism.” Visitors can buy anything from radiation detectors, tents, and survival rations to guides on avoiding income taxes and making their own license plates to avoid paying licensing fees for their vehicles. Lectures are offered with such titles as “Trapping Techniques for Self-Reliance and Survival,” “Don’t Get Caught With Your Pantry Down,” and “Save Your Life, Be Your Own Doctor.” Three seminars are about life under martial law. Previous expos have featured speakers such as militia leader Bo Gritz, who has spoken about coming plagues, imminent food shortages, and how President Clinton has sold out America. Stephen O’Leary, a University of Southern California professor who studies beliefs about the millennium, says that the expos have become recruitment centers for anti-government, survivalist militia groups who often hold racist and anti-Semitic views. “It’s not just about preparing for an emergency or disaster,” he says. “What they’re selling is a whole world view—a program for the apocalypse.” Potok, who has attended previous expos, says “it’s not unusual to see booths for the John Birch Society (see March 10, 1961 and December 2011) and the Montana Militia next to a granola salesman.” The radical right, Potok says, is using fears of the upcoming millennium—“Y2K”—to fuel hysteria about what they say is the imminent declaration of martial law by the federal government and the eradication of constitutional liberties. Chittock calls such concerns “nonsense.” Barry Morrison of the Anti-Defamation League says of the expos: “What we’re concerned about is that some people take the position that the government is not to be trusted. Some of these exhibitors… portray people like Jews in an unfavorable light and as having undue control over their lives.” Morrison says anti-Semitic tracts espousing “Christian Identity” ideology (see 1960s and After) have appeared at previous expos. He also says Gritz’s Liberty Lobby is “the most influential anti-Semitic propaganda organization in America today.” He adds: “I’m not saying everyone [at the expos] is an extremist or subscribes to those views, but this is a vehicle that attracts that element. It’s part of the mix.” [Philadelphia Inquirer, 6/11/1999; Southern Poverty Law Center, 6/2001]

Joseph Farah, the publisher of the right-wing news blog WorldNetDaily, blasts the FBI for issuing its “Project Megiddo” report, which warns of possible domestic terror activities centering on the transition into the “new millennium” at year’s end (see October 20, 1999). Farah calls the report “more than slanderous, bigoted, and inciteful,” and accuses the FBI of “set[ting] up a system of self-fulfilling prophecies that permits the government to scapegoat groups of people who are enticed into committing illegal acts or conspiring about them by agents provocateur.” Farah claims that his assertions are proven by his belief that the federal government carried out the Oklahoma City bombing (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995) to discredit the far right. “Remember this the next time you hear about a so-called ‘terrorist incident,’” Farah concludes. “And, tell your representatives and senators it’s time to rein in the mad bombers and provocateurs in our own government.” [WorldNetDaily, 12/9/1999]

Conservative pundit and author David Horowitz publishes an op-ed in his Front Page Magazine calling all Democrats “racists,” and claiming that the Democratic Party is “the party of special interest bigots and racial dividers” for its alleged support of “racist school policies.” Horowitz writes, “The Democratic Party has shown that it will go to the wall to preserve the racist laws which enforce these preferences, and to defend the racist school systems that destroy the lives of millions of children every year.” At some point, Horowitz will delete the op-ed from the Front Page Magazine Web site, but it will be quoted in a December 2004 article by progressive media watchdog organization Media Matters. [Media Matters, 12/1/2004]

Conservative pundit and author David Horowitz labels liberal radio host Al Franken a “racist,” publishing a photograph of Franken on his Web site labeled as such. In 2003, Franken termed Horowitz a “racist” in his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, citing numerous examples of what Franken believed to be racist comments from Horowitz. In his op-ed, Horowitz promises to keep the photograph on the front page of his Web publication Front Page Magazine until Franken “apologize[s] to me publicly for this attack.” Horowitz widens his claim, adding that the Internet is studded with Web sites and organizations used by Franken and other liberals to tar conservatives with charges of “racism,” and compares those organizations—including Public Eye, NameBase, MediaTransparency, People for the American Way, and the Southern Poverty Law Center—of being “leftwing version(s) of ‘Red Channels,’ the infamous newsletter that provided lists of Communists in the McCarthy era.” National Review editor Jay Nordlinger joins with Horowitz in attacking Franken in a column published simultaneously on the National Review’s Web site. Horowitz writes that he was aware of Franken’s disparaging remarks about him in his book, but has only now chosen “to take notice of Franken’s assault.” He writes, “There is not a single sentence, or phrase, or comment of mine that could be cited to justify Franken’s attack.” He refuses to say why Franken is a racist, but promises to reveal his evidence of Franken’s racism after Franken apologizes. Responding to Horowitz’s op-ed, the progressive media watchdog organization Media Matters notes several instances of what appear to be overtly racist remarks and writings by Horowitz, including his attempt to characterize the idea of slavery reparations as “racist” (see March 1-2, 2001), and his attempt to claim that blacks themselves are responsible for the economic and criminal depredations their communities endure (see August 16, 1998). [Media Matters, 11/30/2004; Front Page Magazine, 11/30/2004] Horowitz has a long history of labeling liberal and progressive figures and institutions “racist” (see August 29, 2001, March 15, 2002, July 15, 2002, August 5, 2003, and October 9-13, 2004).

Cover of ‘The Shadow Party.’ [Source: Brazos Bookstore]Authors David Horowitz and Richard Poe publish a book titled The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party, that purports to prove Jewish billionaire George Soros, who finances progressive and Democratic Party causes, is in reality a Nazi collaborator and anti-Semite. However, the book is riddled with doctored quotes, misinformation, factual errors, and outright lies. Progressive media watchdog Web site Media Matters notes that the book relies on long-discredited accusations from the authors’ “Front Page Magazine” Web site, from their articles on conservative Web publications such as WorldNetDaily and NewsMax, and on unsourced allegations from political extremist Lyndon LaRouche and his followers, who have called Soros a “Nazi beast-man” and a “small cog in Adolf Eichmann’s killing machine,” aiding “the Holocaust against 500,000 Hungarian Jews.” Media Matters calls the book “a new low in the long-running Republican Party and conservative movement campaign of scurrilous personal attacks against Soros, a major supporter of progressive causes in the US and abroad.” The organization also notes that the Web sites used in the book’s research are largely funded by conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, and Scaife-owned newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review have promoted the book. Media Matters documents numerous issues of doctored quotes and falsified claims in the book. [Media Matters, 8/2/2006]

Martin Peretz, the editor in chief of The New Republic, falsely accuses Jewish billionaire George Soros of being a Nazi collaborator. Soros is now a target of conservative opprobrium for his financial support of Democratic and progressive causes. As a 14-year-old boy, Soros escaped from the Nazis by hiding with a non-Jewish family in Hungary; the father of that family sometimes served deportation notices to Hungarian Jews. Peretz now calls Soros “a young cog in the Hitlerite wheel.” The progressive media watchdog Web site Media Matters notes that Peretz is following the lead of right-wing extremists David Horowitz and Richard Poe, whose book The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party claimed that Soros “survived [the Holocaust] by assimilating to Nazism.” The book was found to be riddled with doctored quotes and factual errors (see August 8, 2006). Peretz uses a transcript of a 1998 interview Soros gave to 60 Minutes reporter Steve Kroft to prove his claim, but edits the transcript to leave out a key section that shows Soros did not collaborate with Nazis. [Media Matters, 2/5/2007; New Republic, 2/12/2007] (The article is dated February 12, 2007, but was posted on the New Republic Web site a week earlier.)

An anonymous chain email circulating through the Internet falsely claims that presidential candidate Barack Obama (D-IL) “was enrolled in a Wahabi school in Jakarta. Wahabism is the RADICAL teaching that is followed by the Muslim terrorists who are now waging Jihad against the western world.” PolitiFact, the nonpartisan, political fact-checking organization sponsored by the St. Petersburg Times, calls the accusation intended to promote a “Manchurian Candidate-style conspiracy theory” about Obama’s birth, his religion, and his citizenship. The email accurately notes that Obama’s father was African and born a Muslim (see January 11, 2008). Obama’s stepfather was Indonesian and raised as a Muslim. However, PolitiFact notes, both men were not religiously observant (Obama has described his father as a practicing atheist). Obama’s American mother was agnostic at best. Obama has said that he grew up with virtually no religious traditions. He has been a practicing Christian for decades (see January 6-11, 2008). “Madrassa” is an Arabic word for “school,” but Americans generally understand the word to mean a school where anti-Western Islamic ideology is taught. The email falsely claims that Obama attended a “madrassa” that engaged in a “RADICAL teaching that is followed by the Muslim terrorists who are now waging Jihad against the western world.” PolitiFact notes: “Westerners typically understand Wahabism to be an austere form of Islam based on a literal reading of the Koran. So is that the type of school Obama attended?” Obama attended a secular public school in Indonesia; a press investigation found the school to be “so progressive that teachers wore miniskirts and all students were encouraged to celebrate Christmas.” The school has never taught Wahabism or any other form of “fringe” Islam. News reports accurately indicate that Obama’s school registration form lists Obama’s religion as “Muslim,” but the form has several other errors, and, PolitiFact notes, “it seems reasonable to assume that he was registered as Muslim simply because his stepfather was Muslim.” Obama also attended a Catholic school in Indonesia for several years. PolitiFact concludes that the email is “a wholesale invention designed to frighten voters.” [St. Petersburg Times, 10/1/2007]

An editorial in the conservative Investors Business Daily (IBD) claims that presidential candidate Barack Obama (D-IL) is an “African nativist” driven by anti-American and anti-Christian views. According to the IBD editorial, “disturbing information has come to light” showing that “[a]t the core of the Democratic front-runner’s faith—whether lapsed Muslim, new Christian, or some mixture of the two—is African nativism, which raises political issues of its own.” The IBD editorial speculates that Obama is driven by “black nationalism” and fears that he and other African-Americans will continue to be held “captive” to “white culture” unless they take action. The editorial points to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, one of the pastors of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ where Obama and his family are members, as an “Afro-centric militant” who serves as Obama’s “personal spiritual adviser.” IBD then sounds the alarm about Obama’s “close family ties to Kenya,” particularly the “Muslim militants” of the Kenyan Luo tribe; Obama’s father was a Luo, as is his older half-brother Abongo “Roy” Obama, whom IBD describes as “a Luo activist… a militant Muslim,” and “a Marxist” who has “urge[d] his younger brother to embrace his African heritage.” IBD warns: “Beyond family politics, these ties have potential foreign policy, even national security, implications.… Would Obama put African tribal or family interests ahead of US interests? It’s a valid question, and one voters deserve to have debated regardless of the racial and religious sensitivities. Thanks to a media blackout of these issues, the electorate has yet to benefit from a thorough vetting of Obama.” IBD then informs its readers of Obama’s “Muslim past,” questioning his Christianity and worrying that if he is indeed a Christian, he would have repudiated his “childhood Muslim faith” and be viewed by Muslims as “an apostate,” thereby making him a possible target of “a fatwah” by radical Islamists. It concludes by avowing that Obama’s “Afrocentric doctrine” will be an overt threat to the US if he is elected president, stating, “If a President Obama’s foreign and domestic policies are anything like the Afrocentric doctrine he’s pledged to uphold, Americans will pay a hefty price, including those among the growing black middle class.” [Investor's Business Daily, 1/16/2008] The editorial comes three weeks after a similar claim by conservative scholar Daniel Pipes (see December 26, 2007), and days after conservative radio host Michael Savage claimed Obama was educated in an Islamic madrassa (see January 10, 2008). The assertions will be debunked (see January 22-24, 2008). [Media Matters, 11/29/2007]

As reported by progressive media watchdog site Media Matters, conservative radio host Michael Savage says of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, “I think he was hand-picked by some very powerful forces both within and outside the United State of America to drag this country into a hell that it has not seen since the Civil War of the middle of the 19th century.” Savage is referring to controversial statements made by Obama’s former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whom Savage calls “the soul of Barack Obama’s movement.” Savage goes on to claim that Wright, and by extension Obama, align themselves with historical enemies of the United States: “And if you want a man who says not ‘God bless America,’ but ‘God d_mn America,’ if you want a man who takes the side of the imperial Japanese army, an army that killed not only hundreds of thousands in the Bataan Death March, but hundreds of thousand of Koreans, an army that operated on people while they were alive in Manchuria, a man who takes the side, in essence, of the Japanese Nazis of World War II, if you want a man who takes the side, in essence, of the Hitlers of the world, then you’ve got it in Barack Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, of the Trinity United Church of Christ.” Obama is merely “an ordinary apparatchik of the Democrat machine in Chicago” whose handlers intend to use Obama to bring upheaval and chaos to the nation. [Media Matters, 3/19/2008]

Cover of ‘The Obama Nation’ [Source: Threshold / FactCheck (.org)]Dr. Jerome Corsi, a conservative author and blogger who was deeply involved in the 2004 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign to besmirch presidential candidate John Kerry (D-MA), publishes a book, The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality. The title is a play on the word ‘abomination.’ In his book, Corsi, who writes for the conservative Web site WorldNetDaily and blogs at the extremist Free Republic, attacks Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama in a fashion similar to that used against Kerry—combining fact, hyperbole, speculation, and outright falsehoods in an attempt to demean and disparage Obama’s character and professional career. The publisher, Threshold (a division of Simon and Schuster devoted to publishing conservative political works), calls the book “[s]crupolously sourced” and “[m]eticulously researched and documented…” Among other allegations, Corsi accuses Obama of growing up under the influence of Communist, socialist, and radical Islamic mentors; of deep and secretive affiliations with ‘60s radicals William Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn; of espousing what he calls “black liberation theology” through his former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright; connections to socialists and radical Islamists in Kenya, his father’s home country; deep and criminal ties to Chicago real-estate mogul Tony Rezko; and an intent to, if elected president, implement what Corsi calls “far-left” domestic and foreign policies. [Simon and Schuster, 8/1/2008; New York Times, 8/12/2008; St. Petersburg Times, 8/20/2008] The book debuts as number one on the New York Times bestseller list, propelled by large bulk sales (large buys by particular organizations designed to artificially elevate sales figures) and an intensive marketing campaign carried out on conservative talk radio shows. “The goal is to defeat Obama,” Corsi says. “I don’t want Obama to be in office.” [New York Times, 8/12/2008]Allegations Roundly Debunked - Unfortunately for Corsi, his allegations do not stand up to scrutiny. FactCheck.org, a non-partisan “‘consumer advocate’ for voters” site run by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, finds that Corsi’s book “is a mishmash of unsupported conjecture, half-truths, logical fallacies and outright falsehoods.” It “is not a reliable source of facts about Obama.” FactCheck notes: “Corsi cites opinion columns and unsourced, anonymous blogs as if they were evidence of factual claims. Where he does cite legitimate news sources, he frequently distorts the facts. In some cases, Corsi simply ignores readily accessible information when it conflicts with his arguments.” The organization notes that Threshold’s chief editor, Republican operative Mary Matalin, said the book was not political, but rather “a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that.” FactCheck responds: “The prominent display of Corsi’s academic title (he holds a Ph.D. in political science) seems clearly calculated to convey academic rigor. But as a scholarly work, The Obama Nation does not measure up. We judge it to be what a hack journalist might call a ‘paste-up job,’ gluing together snippets from here and there without much regard for their truthfulness or accuracy.” [FactCheck (.org), 2008; FactCheck (.org), 9/15/2008] The St. Petersburg Times’s PolitiFact finds, “Taken as a whole, the book’s primary argument is that Obama is a likely communist sympathizer with ties to Islam who has skillfully hidden his true agenda as he ruthlessly pursues elected office,” an argument that the organization concludes is wholly unsupported by Corsi’s arguments and sources. [St. Petersburg Times, 8/1/2008] And an Associated Press article finds the book a “collect[ion of] false rumors and distortions [designed] to portray Obama as a sort of secret radical who can’t be trusted.” [Associated Press, 8/16/2008]Unreliable Sources - As reported by progressive media watchdog site Media Matters, Corsi’s sources are often unreliable: for example, his allegation that Obama’s father divorced his mother according to “Islamic sharia law” is based on a single and unverifiable post made by an anonymous blogger. [Media Matters, 8/4/2008] FactCheck notes that although Corsi points to his over 600 endnotes as proof of his “rigorous” sourcing, many of those endnotes refer to obscure, unverifiable Internet postings, blog posts, and opinion columns. Four of Corsi’s sources refer to his own work. “Where Corsi does cite news sources,” the site says, “he sometimes presents only those that are consistent with his case while ignoring evidence that doesn’t fit the picture he paints.” [FactCheck (.org), 9/15/2008]Demonstrably False Claims - Some of Corsi’s claims are completely false: his statement that Obama did not dedicate his 2004 memoir, Dreams from My Father, to his parents or grandparents is easily debunked merely by reading the book’s introduction, in which Obama wrote, “It is to my family, though—my mother, my grandparents, my siblings, stretched across oceans and continents—that I owe the deepest gratitude and to whom I dedicated this book.” [Media Matters, 8/4/2008; St. Petersburg Times, 8/20/2008] Corsi also claims, falsely, that Obama holds dual citizenship in the US and Kenya, though the Kenyan Constitution specifically prohibits dual citizenship. [FactCheck (.org), 9/15/2008] Corsi goes on to claim that Obama has long rejected his white family members from his mother’s side, including his grandparents in Hawaii who raised him for much of his childhood. This is part of Corsi’s argument about Obama’s secret embrace of the so-called “radical black rage” teachings of American activist Malcolm X. According to Corsi’s reading of Obama’s memoir: “His race, he self-determines, is African-American. In making that determination, he rejects everyone white, including his mother and his grandparents. We do not have to speculate about this. Obama tells this to us outright; his words are direct, defying us to miss his meaning.” But PolitiFact calls this “a significant misreading of Obama’s memoir,” and notes that Corsi ignores a large amount of evidence that points to Obama’s continued close relationship with his white family members throughout his life. PolitiFact concludes, “To conclude that Obama rejects everyone white, including his mother and his grandparents, Corsi has to significantly read against the memoir’s stated meaning. We find factual evidence also contradicts this statement, indicating that Obama maintained lifelong relations with his white relatives.” [St. Petersburg Times, 8/1/2008]Insinuations and Leading Questions - Many of Corsi’s allegations are based on little more than questions and insinuations: for example, Corsi insinuates that Obama may not have stopped using marijuana and cocaine, as he admitted to doing during his high school years. Corsi writes: “Still, Obama has yet to answer questions whether he ever dealt drugs, or if he stopped using marijuana and cocaine completely in college, or whether his drug usage extended into his law school days or beyond. Did Obama ever use drugs in his days as a community organizer in Chicago, or when he was a state senator from Illinois? How about in the US Senate? If Obama quit using drugs, the public inquiry certain to occur in a general election campaign for the presidency will most certainly aim at the when, how and why…?” According to Media Matters, Obama wrote in his book Dreams from My Father that he stopped using drugs shortly after beginning college. [Media Matters, 8/4/2008] FactCheck notes: “Corsi… slyly insinuates—without offering any evidence—that Obama might have ‘dealt drugs’ in addition to using them. And he falsely claims that Obama has ‘yet to answer’ whether he continued using drugs during his law school days or afterward.… In fact, Obama has answered that question twice, including once in the autobiography that Corsi reviews in his book.” Guilt by Association - Corsi alleges that Obama has links to Kenyan presidential candidate Raila Odinga, and claims that Obama is somehow linked to the violence surrounding the 2007 Kenyan presidential election. He bases his claim on a single visit by Obama and his wife, Michelle, to Kenya, where they publicly took AIDS tests to demonstrate the tests’ safety. In the testing process, Obama spoke briefly to the crowd. Odinga was on stage while Obama spoke. Corsi construes the speech as an Obama endorsement of Odinga, and, as FactCheck writes, “[h]e goes on to attribute all the violence in Kenya to an elaborate Odinga plot.” Corsi ignores the fact that during that trip, Obama also met with the other Kenyan presidential candidate, Mwai Kibaki, and with opposition leader Uhuru Kenyatta. Human Rights Watch blamed the violence following the election on both Odinga and Kibaki and their followers. FactCheck notes that Corsi uses the logical fallacy of “guilt by association” to fill Chapters 3 through 7. [FactCheck (.org), 9/15/2008]Misquoting Other Sources - Media Matters finds that Corsi sometimes misquotes and rewrites source material, as when he attributed a claim concerning Obama’s supposedly untoward business relationship with Rezko to articles in the Chicago Sun-Times, the Boston Globe, and Salon (.com) that made none of the claims Corsi attributes to them. Corsi also misquoted the conservative Web site NewsMax when he used one of its articles to falsely claim that Obama had been present at Chicago’s Trinity United Church during Reverend Wright’s denunciation of America’s “white arrogance.” (Obama was actually in Miami during Wright’s sermon.) [Media Matters, 8/4/2008] Corsi uses a man he calls one of Obama’s “closest” childhood friends, Indonesian Zulfan Adi, to back his assertion that Obama was once a practicing Muslim. However, Corsi does not report that Adi later retracted his claims about Obama’s religious practices, and admitted to knowing Obama for only a few months. Corsi also ignores a Chicago Tribune story that contains interviews with “dozens of former classmates, teachers, neighbors and friends [who] show that Obama was not a regular practicing Muslim when he was in Indonesia,” and other media reports that have conclusively proven Obama was never a Muslim (see January 22-24, 2008). Ignoring the Obvious - Corsi repeatedly claims that Obama is a master speaker who bedazzles crowds with soaring flights of rhetoric, but never actually gives any specifics of what he intends to do as president. He writes: “At the end of every rhetorically uplifting speech Obama gives about the future of hope, millions of listeners are still left pondering, ‘Now what exactly did he say?’ If the politician is the message, as [campaign manager David] Axelrod and Obama have proclaimed, they can’t forever avoid telling us what precisely that message is.” But FactCheck notes that “Obama’s Web site is packed with details of what he proposes to do if elected. He lays out descriptions of his policy proposals, including tax cuts for most families and increases for those making more than $250,000 per year; a $150 billion, 10-year program to develop alternative energy sources and more efficient vehicles; a proposal to increase the size of the Army by 65,000 troops and another to create a public health insurance plan for those whose employers don’t offer health coverage. Whether or not one agrees with them, Obama has indeed presented detailed plans for dozens of policies. It’s hard to see how anyone writing a book on Obama could fail to acknowledge their existence.” Conspiracy Theorist, 'Bigot,' and Veteran Liar - FactCheck notes: “Corsi is a renowned conspiracy theorist who says that [President] George Bush is attempting to create a North American Union… and that there is evidence that the World Trade Center may have collapsed [after the 9/11 attacks] because it was seeded with explosives. More recently, Corsi claimed that Obama released a fake birth certificate. We’ve debunked that twice now. [M]any of the themes in The Obama Nation are reworked versions of bogus chain e-mail smears.” [FactCheck (.org), 9/15/2008] In August 2004, Media Matters found that Corsi routinely embraced both extremist opinions and personal invective. Corsi called Islam “a worthless, dangerous Satanic religion.” Of Catholicism, he wrote, “Boy buggering in both Islam and Catholicism is okay with the Pope as long as it isn’t reported by the liberal press.” Of Muslims themselves, he wrote, “RAGHEADS are Boy-Bumpers as clearly as they are Women-Haters—it all goes together.” And of Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY), he wrote: “Anybody ask why HELLary couldn’t keep BJ Bill [former President Clinton] satisfied? Not lesbo or anything, is she?” [Media Matters, 8/6/2004] (Corsi posted these comments on the Free Republic under the moniker “jrlc,” and identified himself as “jrlc” on March 19, 2004.) [Free Republic, 3/18/2004; Jerome Corsi, 8/7/2004] An Obama campaign spokesman calls Corsi “a discredited, fringe bigot.” [Associated Press, 8/16/2008] FactCheck concludes, “In Corsi’s case, we judge that both his reputation and his latest book fall short when measured by the standards of good scholarship, or even of mediocre journalism.” [FactCheck (.org), 9/15/2008] PolitiFact concludes: “A reader might think that because the book is printed by a mainstream publishing house it is well-researched and credible. On the contrary—we find The Obama Nation to be an unreliable document for factual information about Barack Obama.” [St. Petersburg Times, 8/20/2008]

Sarah Obama, standing with her step-grandson Barack Obama in a 2009 photograph. [Source: Shooting from the Lip (.com)]Bishop Ron McRae of the Anabaptist Church of North America calls Sarah Onyango Obama, presidential candidate Barack Obama’s elderly step-grandmother. McRae, in Pennsylvania, speaks to Mrs. Obama in Kenya over a garbled and troubled telephone connection; Mrs. Obama uses at least one translator, Vitalis Akech Ogombe (a cousin of Obama’s and the grandson of Sarah Obama), because she speaks Luo and Swahili. (Apparently some, if not all, of the conversation is translated between English, Swahili, Luo, then back to Swahili, and then into English.) Additionally, the conversation takes place during a riotous celebration, and on the Kenyan side is being heard through a speakerphone. McRae set the conversation up through a contact, Kweli Shuhubia, a Kenyan Christian evangelist McRae knows as “Brother Tom,” and who, in an exchange of emails, apparently demanded money and goods for setting up the “operation,” as he and McRae call it. The telephone conversation lasts 14 minutes, and McRae apparently does not inform the Kenyans that they are being recorded. The resulting audiotape creates a firestorm of controversy over President Obama’s supposed birth in Kenya, because it appears that Mrs. Obama says she saw him born in Kenya. McRae quickly makes an edited portion of the audiotape available on the Internet. It says in part: McRae: - “Could I ask her about his actual birthplace? I would like to see his birthplace when I come to visit Kenya in December. Was she present when he was born in Kenya?” Ogombe: - “She says yes she was. She was present when Obama was born.” The edited version does not contain the next portion: McRae: - “Okay, when I come in December, I would like to go by the place, the hospital where he was born. Could you tell me where he was born? Was he born in Mombasa?” Ogombe: - “No. Obama was not born in Mombasa. He was born in America.” McRae: - “Whereabouts was he born? I thought he was born in Kenya.” Ogombe: - “He was born in America, not in Mombasa.” McRae: - “Do you know where he was born? I thought he was born in Kenya. I was gonna go by and see where he was born.” Ogombe: - “Hawaii. She says he was born in Hawaii. In the state of Hawaii, where his father, his father was also learning there. The state of Hawaii.” McRae: - “I thought she said she was present. Was she able to see him being born in Hawaii?” Translator: - “No, no.… She was not… she was here in Kenya. Obama was born in America.… Because the grandmother was back in Kenya and Obama was born in America, where he is from, where his father was learning, learning in America, the United States.” Instead of posting the entire audiotape, McRae will continue to insist that Sarah Obama confirmed Obama’s Kenyan birth. McRae submits an affidavit that states in part: “Though some few younger relatives, including Mr. Ogombe (one of the translators), have obviously been versed to counter such facts with the common purported information from the American news media that Obama was born in Hawaii, Ms. Sarah Hussein Obama was very adamant that her grandson, Senator Barack Hussein Obama, was born in Kenya, and that she was present and witnessed his birth in Kenya, not the United States. When Mr. Ogombe attempted to counter Sarah Obama’s clear responses to the question, verifying the birth of Senator Obama in Kenya, I asked Mr. Ogombe how she could be present at Barack Obama’s birth if the senator was born in Hawaii, but Ogombe would not answer the question, instead he repeatedly tried to insert that, ‘No, no, no. He was born in the United States!’” PolitiFact, the nonpartisan, political fact-checking organization sponsored by the St. Petersburg Times, notes that a March 2007 story in the Chicago Tribune featured a quote from reporter Tim Jones, who spoke with Sarah Obama and quoted her as saying that she received a letter announcing Obama’s birth and she “was so happy to have a grandchild in the US.” PolitiFact concludes that the audiotape as presented was “tightly… edited” to give a false impression that Mrs. Obama had seen Barack Obama being born in a Kenyan hospital. [Greg Doudna, 12/9/2008 ; Obama Conspiracy (.org), 3/6/2009; St. Petersburg Times, 4/7/2011] McRae will release his edited audiotape in the last week of October 2008, in an apparent attempt to influence the upcoming presidential election. [Greg Doudna, 12/9/2008 ]Explanation of Hoax - Investigative blogger Greg Doudna, who later obtains a copy of the unedited audiotape and makes it, and a transcript, available on the Internet, explains McRae’s reasoning behind the hoax. “In this conversation McRae sought to obtain evidence on tape in support of a conspiracy theory circulating in certain right-wing circles in America, namely, that Barack Obama Jr. was not born in Hawaii in 1961 as represented, but actually was secretly born in Kenya. According to this theory, Obama’s mother, then-18-year-old Ann Dunham, waited until about seven or eight months into her pregnancy to take a grueling transcontinental flight halfway across the world to Kenya, there to discover that because of her pregnancy she was not allowed by an airline to get on the plane back to the US, and so was forced to have her baby—the future president of the United States—in a hospital in Kenya. Motivated by a desire to ensure that her child would be regarded as a US citizen with all rights thereof, she or fellow-conspirator family members plotted to have [Obama’s] birth recorded in Hawaii as if it happened in Hawaii, including placing a notice in a Hololulu newspaper of the birth, which was published a few days later (see July 2008). The plot succeeded (so the story goes), and the secret of the true circumstances of Barack Obama Jr.‘s birth in Kenya was closely held by the family, so much so that neither Ann Dunham nor any other family member ever spoke of a trip of Ann Dunham to Kenya in all the years since.” The “conspiracy” would have worked, Doudna writes, had Obama not decided to run for president. “No witness, document, evidence, or testimony has been produced which locates Ann Dunham anywhere outside the United States at any time in her life prior to 1967, when she and young Barack Jr. went to live for several years in Indonesia. Neither the outgoing Bush administration, the Republican Party, the McCain campaign, nor any of Obama’s earlier rivals for the Democratic nomination disclosed any awareness of evidence that Obama was born in Kenya, or in any other way ineligible to be president. Yet the notion is fervently believed, like an urban legend that will not die.” [Greg Doudna, 12/9/2008 ]Audiotape Used in Lawsuit - The edited audiotape will be presented as “evidence” of Obama’s supposed Kenyan citizenship in a lawsuit (see August 21-24, 2008).

Libertarian Representative Ron Paul (R-TX—see 1978-1996, July 9-10, 2006, July 22, 2007, and August 4, 2008) gives an interview to radio host Alex Jones in which he accuses President-elect Barack Obama of working to undermine the US government in favor of a “new world order” (see September 11, 1990), a UN-led “one-world government.” Paul says that he believes the incoming Obama administration is orchestrating some sort of “international crisis” that will give Obama the chance to begin implementing his sinister plan: “I think it’s going to be an announcement of a new monetary order, and they’ll probably make it sound very limited, they’re not going to say this is world government, even though it is if you control the world’s money and you control the military, which they do indirectly.… A world central bank, worldwide regulation and world control of the whole system, of all the commodities and all the natural resources, what else can you call it other than world government?… Obama wouldn’t be there if he didn’t toe the line.… [T]his could be the beginning of the end of what’s left of our national sovereignty.” Paul says that many non-US media outlets are already hailing Obama as “the world’s leader.” [Crooks and Liars, 11/17/2008]

As reported by progressive media watchdog site Media Matters, conservative radio host Michael Savage tells his audience that President-elect Barack Obama’s grandmother “suspiciously died virtually the night before the election,” in an apparent attempt to question Obama’s pre-election trip to Hawaii. Obama visited his grandmother in late October, shortly before her death on November 3. Savage ties in his questions about Obama’s grandmother and her “suspicious death” to discredited claims that Obama has been unable to verify his US citizenship. Savage tells his listeners: “Well, we don’t even know where Obama was born. His grandmother died the night before the election. There’s a lot of questions around this character that the media won’t answer. Let’s start with what country he’s from. Why was the birth certificate never produced? Why in the world did he take time off from the campaign to visit the grandmother who then suddenly and suspiciously died virtually the night before the election? Tell me about that.” Savage and other conservative commentators have suggested that Obama went to Hawaii, not to visit his gravely ill grandmother, but to address charges that his birth certificate is not valid. [Media Matters, 11/14/2008] Savage is one of a number of conservative radio hosts to spread false rumors about Obama’s birth certificate (see October 8-10, 2008). Obama produced a copy of his birth certificate months before (see June 13, 2008). A number of organizations have verified that Obama’s birth certificate is valid and authentic (see June 27, 2008 and August 21, 2008), as have Hawaii Health Department officials (see October 30, 2008). [St. Petersburg Times, 6/27/2008; WorldNetDaily, 8/23/2008; FactCheck (.org), 11/1/2008] According to Talkers Magazine, Savage is third in talk-radio listenership across the US, behind fellow conservatives Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. [Media Matters, 11/14/2008]

President-elect Barack Obama faces another challenge to his presidency—an Internet-based effort to block the US Electoral College from certifying him as president, according to a report from the Christian Science Monitor. The challenge centers on long-debunked accusations that Obama is not a US citizen (see June 13, 2008, June 27, 2008, July 2008, August 21, 2008, and October 30, 2008). The Electoral College meets on December 15 to cast its votes, as garnered through the November 4 election results. The Constitution requires that the president be a US citizen; the people behind this effort insist that Obama was born in Kenya, and not in Hawaii as his birth certificate attests. North Carolina Secretary of State Elaine Marshall says: “Most of the world thinks this is settled except for a few conspiracy theorists. In the 2000 election… Republican electors felt under siege, and I expect the Democrat electors may end up feeling the same way [this time].” North Carolina elector Wayne Abraham (D-NC) says he has received three letters and a phone call asking him not to vote for Obama. “I was surprised, but I’m not worried about it,” he says. “As I said to the lady on the phone, I figured that the Bush administration had ample opportunity to investigate Senator Obama, and if they had discovered he was not truly a citizen they… would have let us know.” Immigration law expert Peter Spiro of Temple University says the entire issue is a “nonstarter, because Obama was born in Hawaii.” The biggest effort of the attempt to stop the Electoral College from certifying Obama’s presidency is a lawsuit in California brought by failed presidential candidate Alan Keyes (see November 12, 2008 and After). Lawyer Philip Berg, who has lost a lawsuit challenging Obama’s citizenship (see August 21-24, 2008), says: “People are going after electors now because they can only vote for a qualified candidate, and [Obama] hasn’t shown he’s qualified. I think we have enough trouble—we don’t need a fake president.” Melanie Siewert of Kenansville, North Carolina, says the questions surrounding Obama’s citizenship have moved her to get involved in politics for the first time in her life. “I’m not asking electors to overturn their vote, but really to, before we vote, to make absolutely sure,” she says. She says she has contacted most of North Carolina’s 15 electors. “This is not being a sore loser or racist. This is just about ensuring that our leader is being truthful about who he is.” Presidential historian Perry Leavell says: “Human beings will always go for myth because it’s compelling, dramatic, and, if it were true, it would be able to change history. You can go back into the history of the American presidency and find over and over again people… who are prepared to believe the exact opposite of what all the data would say.” Constitutional law binds state electors to cast their votes for the candidate who won their state. [Christian Science Monitor, 11/26/2008] The Electoral College will vote for Obama as president. [WRAL-TV, 12/15/2008]

Salon columnist Alex Koppelman explores the widening sets of claims that purport to prove President Barack Obama is not a US citizen—the heart of the so-called “birther” conspiracy theory. The Obama campaign long ago produced a valid birth certificate that allowed Obama to run legitimately as a presidential candidate (see June 13, 2008), Obama’s mother Ann Dunham has also affirmed her son’s citizenship, and Hawaiian officials have confirmed that Obama was indeed born in a hospital in Honolulu (see October 30, 2008). However, some on the right continue to promulgate the tale of Obama’s supposed Kenyan citizenship, or Indonesian citizenship, or British citizenship. The Chigago Tribune recently ran a paid advertisement questioning Obama’s citizenship (see December 3, 2008). Conservative news and opinion blogs such as WorldNetDaily run stories on a near-daily basis challenging Obama’s citizenship, or producing hoax “birth certificates” that “prove” Obama was born in Mombasa, Kenya, or other locales (see July 20, 2008). Plaintiffs have filed lawsuits challenging Obama’s citizenship in a number of state courts, all of which have been rejected (see March 14 - July 24, 2008, August 21-24, 2008, October 9-28, 2008, October 17-22, 2008, October 21, 2008, October 31 - November 3, 2008, October 24, 2008, October 31, 2008 and After, November 12, 2008 and After, November 13, 2008, and Around November 26, 2008), and a similar case goes up for review in the Supreme Court (that case also challenges Republican presidential contender John McCain’s citizenship, as McCain was born in the former Panama Canal Zone to parents serving in the US military, another legitimate way of securing citizenship—see March 14 - July 24, 2008 and August 21-24, 2008). Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic Magazine and a columnist for Scientific American, notes that some people will never let go of the idea that Obama is not a citizen, no matter what level of proof is provided. “There’s no amount of evidence or data that will change somebody’s mind,” he says. “The more data you present a person, the more they doubt it.… Once you’re committed, especially behaviorally committed or financially committed, the more impossible it becomes to change your mind.” Any inconvenient facts are irrelevant, he says. Chip Berlet, a senior analyst with Political Research Associates, agrees. People who believe in a conspiracy theory “develop a selective perception, their mind refuses to accept contrary evidence,” Berlet says. “As soon as you criticize a conspiracy theory, you become part of the conspiracy.” Social psychologist Evan Harrington adds: “One of the tendencies of the conspiracy notion, the whole appeal, is that a lot of the information the believer has is secret or special. The real evidence is out there, [and] you can give them all this evidence, but they’ll have convenient ways to discredit [it].” Koppelman notes that during the presidential election, so-called “birthers” said that they would drop their claims if only Obama would release the “long form” of his birth certificate, even though to do so would be to violate Hawaii’s privacy laws, which keep all such documents under lock and key. During the campaign, Dr. Chiyome Fukino, the director of Hawaii’s Department of Health, released a statement saying she had verified that the state has the original birth certificate on record (see October 30, 2008), and that Obama’s Hawaiian birth is a matter of state record. Experts with the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, part of the FactCheck (.org) organization, have examined the certificate and verified its authenticity (see August 21, 2008), as has PolitiFact (see June 27, 2008). Koppelmann notes that the conspiracy theory has grown to the point where talk-show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage have suggested that Obama used the occasion of his grandmother’s death to go to Hawaii to alter the record (see November 10, 2008). Koppelman notes that many who align themselves with the “birther” movement are well-known conspiratorists. Author Jerome Corsi, who attacked Obama’s citizenship in a pre-election book (see August 1, 2008 and After), has spoken of “secret government plans” to form a “North American Union” with Canada and Mexico. Philip Berg, who filed the lawsuit that had until now drawn the most public attention, asserts that the 9/11 attacks were staged by the US government (so-called “trutherism”). Another critic, Andy Martin, who seems to be the source of the rumor that Obama is a Muslim and is a strong “birther” proponent, was denied an Illinois law license on the grounds that he was mentally unfit to practice law (see October 17-22, 2008). Robert Schulz, who ran the Tribune ads, is a well-known tax protester and anti-government rhetorician. [Salon, 12/5/2008]

Glenn Beck, the former CNN Headline News talk show host who has just signed with Fox News, has a discussion with Fox chief executive Roger Ailes about his intentions as Fox’s newest host. Beck later recalls: “I wanted to meet with Roger and tell him: ‘You may not want to put me on the air. I believe we are in dire trouble, and I will never shut up’.” Far from warning Beck to tone down his rhetoric, Ailes tells Beck that Fox’s primary mission is now to serve as the opposition to the newly elected President Obama (see November 4, 2008). According to Beck, Ailes tells him: “I see this as the Alamo. If I just had somebody who was willing to sit on the other side of the camera until the last shot is fired, we’d be fine.” One of Beck’s primary themes on Headline News has been his fear that the US is becoming a socialist nation, a theme he says Ailes encourages him to develop on Fox. Fox vice president Bill Shine will say: “I think we’ve been doing a very good job of trying to point out some things that maybe some other news organizations haven’t pointed out. We’re kind of looking for things that people aren’t being told.” Major Garrett, Fox’s White House correspondent, will say: “[T]here very may well be a curiosity about the Fox brand interacting with the Obama brand. There may be an expectation of a higher degree of skepticism” (see October 13, 2009). One of Beck’s first additions to his Fox studio is a caricature of Obama drawn to resemble former Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong. [Los Angeles Times, 3/6/2009]

Wall Street Journal editorial board member Stephen Moore, appearing as a guest on Fox News host Glenn Beck’s show, compares Social Security to “a big Ponzi scheme.” Moore and Beck are discussing the issue of the US debt, and Moore compares the cycle of different government agencies buying and selling portions of the debt to one another to Social Security, saying: “It’s very much like the way Social Security works. It’s a big Ponzi scheme. It’s like a big vault of IOUs.” [Media Matters, 2/2/2009; Media Matters, 9/7/2010] Beck will later call Social Security a “Stalinist” program designed to forcibly redistribute wealth to poorer citizens (see January 27, 2010).

Fox News graphic making disproven claims about Congressional health care reform proposals. [Source: Media Matters]The Wall Street Journal, Fox News anchors, conservative Web news purveyor Matt Drudge, and conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh promulgate a discredited claim by health care lobbyist Betsy McCaughey that the economic recovery bill pending in Congress includes a provision that would have the government “essentially dictate treatments” for sick Americans. McCaughey wrote a commentary for Bloomberg News on February 9 that makes the claim (see February 9, 2009); Drudge and Limbaugh echo and add to the claim the same day. The next day, the Wall Street Journal’s senior economic writer, Stephen Moore, appearing on Fox News’s flagship morning news broadcast America’s Newsroom, joins news anchors Bill Hemmer and Megyn Kelly in promoting the same claim (see October 13, 2009), with Moore saying that the provision would “hav[e] the government essentially dictate treatments.” Moore credits Limbaugh with informing him of the claim, saying: “I just learned of this myself yesterday. In fact, Rush Limbaugh made a big deal out of it on his radio show and it just—it caused all sorts of calls into congressional offices.” On February 10, Limbaugh takes credit for spreading the claim, telling listeners: “Betsy McCaughey writing at Bloomberg, I found it. I detailed it for you, and now it’s all over mainstream media. Well, it’s—it headlined Drudge for a while last night and today. Fox News is talking about it.” McCaughey is wrong in the claim: according to an analysis of the legislative language by progressive media watchdog Media Matters, “the language in the House bill that McCaughey referenced does not establish authority to ‘monitor treatments’ or restrict what ‘your doctor is doing’ with regard to patient care but, rather, addresses establishing an electronic records system such that doctors would have complete, accurate information about their patients ‘to help guide medical decisions at the time and place of care.’” Moore says: “[T]his news story really has exploded on the public scene in just the last 24 hours, Bill. We’ve been just inundated with complaints from people about the implications of having the government essentially dictate treatments.” Moore later goes on to add that the bill “especially will affect elderly people, because one of the ways, if we move more towards a nationalized health care system, as this bill would move us one step towards that, what you have to do to restrain costs—what many other countries do, like Canada and Britain, is they essentially, Bill, ration care. And they tell patients you are eligible for this kind of care, but this is too expensive. And so what this bill would essentially do is set up a kind of pricing mechanism to tell people, yes, we can afford to treat you for this, but not that.” Moore encourages viewers to “express their outrage over this” before Congress takes the issue up. Kelly adds another false claim: that the bill discourages doctors to act on their own judgment and promotes medical decisions “in the spirit of uniform health care.” Kelly notes, “That sounds dangerously like socialized medicine.” Hemmer also makes the false claim that the legislation contains “rules [that] appear to set the stage for health care rationing for seniors, new limits on medical research, and new rules guiding decisions your doctor can make about your health care.” Hemmer calls the provision a “midnight health care insertion” into the Senate spending bill. [Media Matters, 2/10/2009]

Fox News on-air graphic repeating a typo from the original Senate Republican Communications Center press release. [Source: Media Matters]Fox News anchor Jon Scott, co-anchor of the “straight news” program Happening Now, uses research provided in a Senate Republican Communications Center (SRCC) press release to make dubious claims about how the Obama economic recovery plan “grew, and grew, and grew” over time. While Scott reports the claims, Fox displays seven graphics illustrating them. The graphics’ textual content hews so closely to the SRCC’s press release that it even repeats a typographical error found in the original memo. Scott and the on-air graphics cite the SRCC’s original sources for their information, which include Politico, the Congressional Quarterly, the Denver Post, the Washington Times, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, but neither Scott nor the graphics acknowledge the SRCC as the source of the research. The typo is in the seventh and last graphic, incorrectly citing the date of a Wall Street Journal article as “12/19/09.” The next day, Scott apologizes, but only for the typo, prompting Washington Post media critic and CNN host Howard Kurtz to say: “We sometimes jab at the pundits for using talking points, but in the case of Fox News anchor Jon Scott, it was literally true this week.… You should be apologizing for using partisan propaganda from the GOP without telling your viewers where it came from. Talk about missing the point” (see October 13, 2009). [Media Matters, 2/10/2009; Media Matters, 2/15/2009]

Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck has a special segment called “War Games” during the week’s broadcasts. In today’s show, he is joined by former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer (see February 1996) and retired Army Sergeant Major, Tim Strong. The three discuss what they say is the upcoming “civil war” in America, which, they assert, will be led by “citizen militias” made up of principled, ideologically correct conservatives. Beck says that he “believes we’re on this road.” The three decide among themselves that the US military would refuse to obey President Obama’s orders to subdue the insurrection and would instead join with “the people” in “defending the Constitution” against the government. [Salon, 2/22/2009] Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin’s blog “Hot Air” features an entry that calls Beck’s rhetoric “implausible” and “nutty.” [Hot Air, 2/22/2009]

Oath Keepers logo, as pictured on a T-shirt sold on the organization’s Web site. [Source: Oath Keepers (.com)]The Oath Keepers, a newly formed far-right “patriot” organization whose membership is restricted to soldiers, police officers, firefighters, and military veterans (see March 2010), is formed at a pro-militia rally in Lexington, Massachusetts, the site of the first battle of the Revolutionary War. It is founded by Army veteran and lawyer Stewart Rhodes, who delivers a fiery speech at the rally. “You need to be alert and aware to the reality of how close we are to having our constitutional republic destroyed,” he tells the assemblage. “Every dictatorship in the history of mankind, whether it is fascist, communist, or whatever, has always set aside normal procedures of due process under times of emergency.… We can’t let that happen here. We need to wake up!” The crowd of listeners includes many well-known “patriot movement” members, including Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff who refused to enforce the federal Brady law (see November 30, 1993) in his jurisdiction; Mike Vanderboegh of the “Three Percenter” movement (see October 1995 and After); and others. Rhodes gives the rally his group’s “Orders We Will Not Obey,” a list of 10 orders he considers unconstitutional and therefore unenforceable, whether they are issued by commanding officers, policemen, or the president. When Rhodes finishes, Captain Larry Bailey, a retired Navy SEAL who leads a group called Gathering of Eagles, asks the crowd to raise their right hands and retake their oath—not to the president, but to the Constitution. [Mother Jones, 3/2010]Posting the 'Orders' - On the Oath Keepers blog, Rhodes posts the “Orders We Will Not Obey” along with an introductory statement culled from the speech given by then-General George Washington before the Battle of Long Island: “The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army.” Rhodes writes: “Such a time is near at hand again. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this Army—and this Marine Corps, This Air Force, This Navy and the National Guard and police units of these sovereign states.” He calls the Oath Keepers “non-partisan,” and issues his list of orders they will refuse to obey, calling these “acts of war” against the American people “and thus acts of treason.” He cites Revolutionary War actions and precedents for each of his 10 statements. “1. We will NOT obey any order to disarm the American people.” Rhodes explains that this means the government will not attempt to restrain gun ownership in any way, and states his group’s opposition to any bans on assault rifles or any attempts to enforce gun regulation or registration. “2. We will NOT obey any order to conduct warrantless searches of the American people, their homes, vehicles, papers, or effects—such as warrantless house-to-house searches for weapons or persons.” Rhodes compares these to the Revolutionary War-era “writs of assistance,” carried out by British soldiers against American colonists without judicial orders. The Constitution proscribes warrantless searches, Rhodes says. “We expect that sweeping warrantless searches of homes and vehicles, under some pretext, will be the means used to attempt to disarm the people,” he writes, and says Oath Keepers will not follow such orders. “3. We will NOT obey any order to detain American citizens as ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ or to subject them to trial by military tribunal.” Any such detentions (see June 26, 2002 and June 9, 2002) are unconstitutional, harking back to Revolutionary War-era admiralty courts and the British “star chambers.” Rhodes predicts that the federal government will attempt to detain its own citizens under international law. “4. We will NOT obey orders to impose martial law or a ‘state of emergency’ on a state, or to enter with force into a state, without the express consent and invitation of that state’s legislature and governor.” Rhodes fears that “states of emergency” will be declared in the aftermath of a natural disaster such as a hurricane or a massive flood, or perhaps another 9/11-level terror attack, and then used to impose tyranny and martial law on the American populace. “5. We will NOT obey orders to invade and subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty and declares the national government to be in violation of the compact by which that state entered the Union.” As many as 20 individual states have either passed or considered what Rhodes calls “courageous resolutions affirming states rights and sovereignty” that take powers from the federal government and give them over to the states. The federal government may attempt to use force to retake these powers, Rhodes writes, especially if a state attempts to secede or declare itself of equal sovereignty with the federal government. “6. We will NOT obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.” One of Rhodes’s most strongly stated fears is what he believes will be the attempts of the federal government to build concentration camps and detain citizens. “7. We will NOT obey any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext.” “8. We will NOT obey orders to assist or support the use of any foreign troops on US soil against the American people to ‘keep the peace’ or to ‘maintain control’ during any emergency, or under any other pretext. We will consider such use of foreign troops against our people to be an invasion and an act of war.” Rhodes believes that the US government may use foreign troops, perhaps under the auspices of the United Nations, to conduct military operations against its own citizenry. “9. We will NOT obey any orders to confiscate the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies, under any emergency pretext whatsoever.” “10. We will NOT obey any orders which infringe on the right of the people to free speech, to peaceably assemble, and to petition their government for a redress of grievances.” Rhodes concludes: “The above list is not exhaustive but we do consider them to be clear tripwires—they form our ‘line in the sand’—and if we receive such orders, we will not obey them. Further, we will know that the time for another American Revolution is nigh. If you the people decide that you have no recourse, and such a revolution comes, at that time, not only will we NOT fire upon our fellow Americans who righteously resist such egregious violations of their God given rights, we will join them in fighting against those who dare attempt to enslave them.… The mission of Oath Keepers is to vastly increase their numbers. We are in a battle for the hearts and minds of our own troops. Help us win it.” [Stewart Rhodes, 3/9/2009] Army spokesman Nathan Banks will remind the members that following through on their Oath Keepers pledge could mean serious repercussions. “You have every right to disobey an order if you think it is illegal,” Banks will say. “But you will face court-martial, and so help you God if you are wrong. Saying something isn’t constitutional isn’t going to fly.” Associated with Tea Party Movement - After the 2009 rally, Rhodes’s organization will become closely affiliated with the tea party movement; on July 4, 2009, Rhodes will send speakers to administer his organization’s “oath” at over 30 tea party rallies across the nation. He will take part in the September 12, 2009 “9/12” march in Washington, DC (see September 12, 2009), and host rallies in Florida and other states. [Mother Jones, 3/2010]

Martha MacCallum. [Source: The Activity Pit]Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum, host of Fox’s “straight news” show The Live Desk, airs clips of Vice President Joseph Biden taken during a September 2008 campaign event to falsely imply that Biden is contradicting the Obama administration’s current stance on the economy. MacCallum tells viewers that “after weeks of economic doom and gloom, the Obama administration is now singing a slightly different tune. Take a look at what was said in recent interviews this weekend.” Fox then airs a clip of Biden telling an audience, “The fundamentals of the economy are strong.” The clip is not from an interview held over the weekend, but from a campaign event held seven months before. MacCallum does not inform her viewers of the timing of the clip, nor does she note that Biden was criticizing Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s economic views, which he characterized as unrealistically rosy. Instead, she goes on to claim that the administration has fundamentally, and dishonestly, shifted its views on the economy from a positive campaign outlook to a more “doom and gloom” viewpoint. In the September 2008 campaign rally, Biden told a Michigan audience: “I believe that’s why John McCain could say with a straight face, as recently as this morning—and this is a quote, ‘The fundamentals of the economy are strong.’ That’s what John says. He says that ‘we’ve made great progress economically’ in the Bush years.… I could walk from here to Lansing, and I wouldn’t run into a single person who thought our economy was doing well, unless I ran into John McCain.” Alongside the Biden clip, Fox also airs footage of Austan Goolsbee, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. On March 15, Goolsbee told a Fox News Sunday audience that “the core strength of the economy is middle-class workers.” Fox airs that clip immediately after the Biden clip. What it does not air is Goolsbee’s statement just after the broadcast statement, in which he said, “Over the last eight years, before this president came into office, we saw an unbelievable squeeze on the middle class like nothing we have seen in decades.” MacCallum uses the clips to accuse the Obama administration of “singing… a bit of a different tune” now than during the campaign. [Media Matters, 3/16/2009] The next day, MacCallum apologizes for asserting the seven-month-old clip was recent. She tells viewers that Fox News “inadvertently used a piece of video of Vice President Biden saying that, quote, the fundamentals of the economy are strong. This video was from the campaign trail, when the vice president was a candidate, and was actually quoting Senator John McCain. When we get something wrong, we admit it. We did so yesterday, and for that, we apologize” (see October 13, 2009). [Media Matters, 3/17/2009]

Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck, joined by National Review deputy managing editor Kevin Williamson, asserts that Obama administration members are working behind the scenes to move towards what they call a “one-world government.” Williamson tells Beck and their viewers that Carol Browner, assistant to the president for energy and climate change, belongs to a group that is “arguing for… the same stuff that the left is always arguing for, which is transferring wealth and power out of citizens’ hands and into the government’s hands.” Williamson continues: “You know, the left always needs an emergency because they can’t get this stuff done through normal democratic means. So, in the ‘30s, it was the Depression, and then it was World War II. Then it was the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation. And then after the Soviet Union fell apart, it became the environmental movement.” Beck responds: “Right. Let me—I’m going to have them take you someplace that I like to call ‘one-world government.’” Beck later says that Browner “was involved in a socialist organization” that “wants one-world government.” Williamson agrees: “Yeah, they’re big on what they call, you know, global architecture, transnational architecture, which is just another way of saying sort of UN-style bureaucracies that would be international in nature and would de-emphasize American power and global leadership.” [Media Matters, 4/10/2009] Beck and Williamson are echoing claims made in the ‘90s and later by extremist militia groups, which warned that the US government intended to implement a “new world order” (see September 11, 1990) of a one-world government that would result in the confiscation of Americans’ guns, and a general replacement of democracy for tyranny (see 1994, January 1994, February 1995, July 4-11, 1997, October 20, 1999, April 14-15, 2009, January 21, 2010, and October 11, 2010).

Fox News senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano hosts radio host Alex Jones on the online program Freedom Watch. Jones says that he has long pointed out “how hundreds of mainstream news articles a week are saying there is a new world order, a global government. It will be run by the very banks that are collapsing society by design, and we will pay carbon taxes to them.… [T]he good news is, I’ve never seen an awakening this big. And I’m seeing, you know, people like Glenn Beck talk about the new world order on Fox. I’m seeing you talk about it for years before him. We’re seeing [CNN host] Lou Dobbs talk about it. We’re seeing, you know, mainline talk show hosts—[radio host Rush] Limbaugh is even talking about global government now. [Radio host] Michael Savage is talking about how he thinks, you know, Obama may stage crises to bring in martial law.” [Media Matters, 4/10/2009] Jones is echoing claims made in the ‘90s and later by extremist militia groups, which warned that the US government intended to implement a “new world order” (see September 11, 1990) of a one-world government that would result in the confiscation of Americans’ guns, and a general replacement of democracy for tyranny (see 1994, January 1994, February 1995, July 4-11, 1997, October 20, 1999, April 14-15, 2009, January 21, 2010, and October 11, 2010), and that are echoed by Fox News pundits such as Glenn Beck (see March 17, 2009), Bill O’Reilly (see April 1-2, 2009), and others (see April 6, 2009).

Bill Hemmer. [Source: New York Daily News]Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer, host of Fox News’s flagship news program America’s Newsroom, hosts several segments touting the April 15 “tea party” protests (see April 8, 2009 and April 15, 2009). Hemmer notes protests in Florida and Ohio that occurred in recent days, and directs viewers to the Web site for America’s Newsroom for more information. He says: “Protesters, well, they waved flags and signs and with slogans like ‘Repeal the Pork’ and ‘Our Bacon is Cooked.’ I say, our bacon is cooked. They’re popping up literally all across the country now.… If you go to our Web site, you will find a growing list of these events, hundreds of photos, and a new tea party anthem that you will hear from the man who wrote it and recorded it next hour. And there’s a list of the nationwide Tax Day tea party events coming up on the 15th of April, which will be a huge deal for those organizations. So check it out online right now” (see October 13, 2009). The song is by Lloyd Marcus of the National Association for the Advancement of Conservative People of Color, who has been on what he tells Hemmer was “a 40-city ‘Stop Obama’ tour.” Marcus’s song is extremely critical of President Obama’s policies and supportive of the “tea parties.” The lyrics are posted on FoxNews.com. [Media Matters, 4/8/2009]

Eric Cantor (R-VA), the House Minority Whip, while appearing on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” agrees with a caller that the Obama administration is moving the US towards one-party fascist rule. The caller says: “But what really is scaring the rest of us, the other half of us, is the fascism. I mean the true fascism that is happening in this country today.… The belligerent takeover of a one-party system.” Without repeating the terminology, Cantor agrees: “Now as far as a one-party government in here, I think what the public is doing, they’re finally waking up and everybody is realizing that checks and balances are a part of the system and divided government is something that is beneficial to a balanced debate, and something that can produce a better outcome. Which is exactly why Republicans in the House have said, ‘Look, we want to work with our colleagues on the other side of the aisle. We want to try to bring this president back into the mainstream.’” [Think Progress, 3/25/2009]

Fox News host Glenn Beck, on his daily radio show, hosts US Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN) to discuss her proposed constitutional amendment “to prohibit the president from entering into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States.” Beck says to Bachmann: “I don’t want to believe that there are people in our country that would trash our dollar like this. And what’s going to happen is if you start to talk about a global currency, which I’m telling you, there’s no way out of what we’re doing now besides devaluing the dollar to pay off our debt and then have a new currency. There’s just no other way.… [W]hat happens is when you stand up, and when you say those things, then you’re deemed a kook. Then you’re deemed a militia member.” Bachmann says later in the interview: “The president is committing us so much now, and Congress is committing us to so much spending, that the only way out will be for him to continue to print money and have wild inflation. And once that collapses, then it’s a global currency. Well, then we are no more as a nation. We cease at that point.” Beck responds: “I believe it. But convincing everybody else may be a different story.” [Glenn Beck, 3/29/2009; Media Matters, 4/10/2009]

The New York Post publishes an article headlined “Scary! Obama nominee wants one world order.” The article, by Post reporter Meghan Clyne, attacks President Obama’s nomination of Yale Law School dean Harold Koh as legal adviser to the State Department. Clyne says Koh is a “fan of ‘transnational legal process,’ arguing that the distinctions between US and international law should vanish.” She says that according to Koh’s views, judges should put aside the Constitution in favor of “legal ‘norms’” from other nations’ laws. “Sharia law could apply to disputes in US courts,” she writes. “The United States constitutes an ‘axis of disobedience’ along with North Korea and Saddam-era Iraq.” The newly launched Fox Nation, the blog for Fox News, links to the article, which disappears from the Post’s Web archive shortly thereafter. [Fox Nation, 3/31/2009; Media Matters, 4/10/2009] An extraordinarily racist conservative blog, Chimpout, hosts a forum discussion of the article under the heading “Osambo picks another douche bag for his cabinet.” The forum’s thread is part of a larger discussion section entitled “N_gger College” and a subsection entitled “F_cked Up Facts about First Monkey,” an apparent reference to Obama. Commenters immediately begin launching “birther”-styled accusations of Obama being an illegal president because of his “Kenyan birth” (see October 8, 2008, October 16, 2008 and After, November 10, 2008, August 1-4, 2009, and August 4, 2009), and say Obama should be relegated to “picking cotton.” [Chimpout, 3/31/2009] Days later, Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck, conservative editor Cliff Kincaid, and former Republican Senator Rick Santorum will join in attacking Koh (see April 1, 2009, April 6, 2009, and April 9, 2009).

Dick Morris discussing the economy on Fox News. [Source: Fox News]Conservative political pundit Dick Morris tells a Fox News audience that the recent G20 economic summit advocated a “global approach” to the current economic crisis, and discussed putting both the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Federal Reserve under the control of the International Monetary Fund—a position not advocated or discussed by anyone in the Obama administration. He worries that there will soon be what he calls “a supernational authority run by bureaucrats, not by elected officials, that will be telling the elected governments, including the United States, what its [economic] regulations should be.” President Obama is far more amenable to the idea of allowing a multinational authority to control the US economy, Morris insists, and adds that Obama intends to preside over what he calls “a global redistribution of income, downward,” using environmental policy as “an excuse.” “We’re about to meet Barack Obama the internationalist,” Morris continues, “not fighting for American interests, but looking for global coordination.” He concludes, “Those crazies in Montana who say, ‘We’re going to kill ATF agents because the UN’s going to take over’—well, they’re beginning to have a case.” [Media Matters, 3/31/2009]

Former Danish Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, president of the Party of European Socialists, writes a Wall Street Journal op-ed that advocates a greater level of communication and cooperation between governments to address the global economic crisis. Rasmussen writes in part: “We must keep up the pressure by demanding a globalization that works for everyone, and forge new alliances and new lines of communication across national boundaries. We must develop new, progressive ways to achieve global justice.” He advocates the expansion of European “state health care, social housing, education, unemployment support, and other universal, tax-funded services” to “the developing world, where according to the World Health Organization between 200,000 and 400,000 additional children will die each year due to the global economic downturn.” He calls free-market capitalist ideology “simplistic” as “championed by Reagan, Thatcher, and their ideological heirs,” and a failure “on a momentous scale.” The next night, Fox News talk show host Bill O’Reilly attacks Rasmussen as advocating a Marxist solution, and espousing a “one-world” view. O’Reilly says: “Well, Karl Marx could not have said it better. Global justice requires that a one-world government seize private property and distribute it so that every human being has roughly the same amount of resources. The Denmark guy’s vision is nothing new, but it’s now being recycled as justice.” O’Reilly says that “[s]ome believe Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), and President Obama himself are sympathetic to the one-world, global-justice view,” and concludes: “Key question: Where does Barack Obama stand? Are the right-wing pundits correct? Is he down with the global-justice jihad? There’s no hard evidence to suggest that he is, but he has not repudiated the false vision either. Until President Obama does, speculation will rage.” [Wall Street Journal, 4/2/2009; Media Matters, 4/10/2009] O’Reilly is following recent, similar claims by Fox News guest Alex Jones (see March 18, 2009), Fox host Glenn Beck and his guests (see March 17, 2009 and March 24, 2009), and Fox News contributor Charles Payne (see March 24, 2009).

Cliff Kincaid, the editor of the conservative Accuracy in Media, accuses President Obama of seeking to appoint an advocate of the “new world order” to the State Department. Kincaid is referring to Obama’s nomination of Yale Law School dean Harold Koh as legal adviser to the State Department. Kincaid says Koh’s nomination “is beyond worrisome. This is terrifying that—the thought of this kind of guy with these views becoming the top lawyer at the State Department. But seen in the light of the some of the other appointments Obama has made, it’s consistent with his push, which is now out in the open, for the US to become really subsumed into this, quote, ‘new world order’ that everybody keeps talking about, in which our sovereignty has been sacrificed for the, quote, ‘greater good.’” Kincaid is harking back to claims made in the ‘90s and later by extremist militia groups, which warned that the US government intended to implement a “new world order” (see September 11, 1990) of a one-world government that would result in the confiscation of Americans’ guns, and a general replacement of democracy for tyranny (see 1994, January 1994, February 1995, July 4-11, 1997, October 20, 1999, April 14-15, 2009, January 21, 2010, and October 11, 2010). [Media Matters, 4/10/2009] Three days later, former Republican Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) will say that Obama’s nomination of the “internationalist” Koh shows that Obama is “contemptuous of American values” (see April 9, 2009).

Former Republican senator Rick Santorum writes in an op-ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer that President Obama is “contemptuous of American values.” Santorum, now a columnist for the Inquirer, ties his comments to the pending nomination of Harold Koh to become the State Department’s lead counsel. Santorum and other far-right conservatives oppose Koh, a former Yale Law School dean, because of his “internationalist” views. Obama’s nomination of Koh for the State Department, and Obama’s recent supposed “apology for American arrogance” to European audiences, “helped convince me that [Obama] has a deep-seated antipathy toward American values and traditions,” Santorum writes. Santorum opposes Koh’s view that the US must become part of the international legal community, and instead insists that the US hold itself apart from international law, a position Santorum shares with the former Bush administration. “Koh’s ‘transnationalism’ stands in contrast to good, old-fashioned notions of national sovereignty, in which our Constitution is the highest law of the land,” Santorum writes. “In the traditional view, controversial matters, whatever they may be, are subject to democratic debate here. They should be resolved by the American people and their representatives, not ‘internationalized.’ What Holland or Belgium or Kenya or any other nation or coalition of nations thinks has no bearing on our exercise of executive, legislative, or judicial power. Koh disagrees. He would decide such matters based on the views of other countries or transnational organizations—or, rather, those entities’ elites.” Koh supports the International Criminal Court, which Santorum views as an objectionable intrusion upon American sovereignty. [Philadelphia Inquirer, 4/9/2009] Santorum is echoing recent arguments by Fox News host Glenn Beck (see April 1, 2009) and Accuracy in Media editor Cliff Kincaid (see April 6, 2009).

Fox News’s flagship morning news broadcast, America’s Newsroom, repeatedly airs video clips promoting the upcoming “tea party” protests for April 15 (see April 8, 2009, April 15, 2009, April 15, 2009, and April 15, 2009). Host Bill Hemmer urges viewers to attend protests near them, and alerts them to “virtual tea parties” being hosted on Fox’s “non-partisan” Web site Fox Nation. One clip exhorts viewers to “say no to biased media and yes to fair play and free speech,” and then prompts them to “express your views, your values” at Fox Nation. Hemmer then tells viewers that commentators Glenn Beck (see April 15, 2009), Sean Hannity, Neil Cavuto, and Greta Van Susteren are reporting and helping host protests in four separate areas around the nation. “Can’t get to a tea party?” Hemmer asks. “Fox Nation hosts a ‘virtual tea party.’ You can check it out on the site.” During Hemmer’s pitch, Fox News airs a clip of a protest sign with “NO to socialism!” written across an American flag with a Soviet-style hammer and sickle in place of the 50 stars (see October 13, 2009). [Media Matters, 4/13/2009]

One of Hayden’s Twitter posts. [Source: Twitteradar (.com)]Daniel Knight Hayden, an Oklahoma man who has declared himself affiliated with local tea party organizations and the “Oath Keeper” movement (see March 9, 2009 and March 2010), is arrested by FBI agents after posting a series of messages on Twitter threatening to unleash a violent attack on Oklahoma state government officials on April 15, “Tax Day.” On April 13, under the moniker “CitizenQuasar,” Hayden began posting a blizzard of “tweets” about his intention to be on the Oklahoma State Capitol steps on the 15th, at first as part of a peaceful tea party event, then escalating into harsher rhetoric, and eventually threats of violence. On April 14, he wrote: “Tea Parties: And Poot Gingrich wants to stand in the limelight. He is a NWO operative,” referring to former Republican House Speaker and tea party favorite Newt Gingrich, and accusing him of being an “operative” for the “New World Order” (see September 11, 1990). Towards midnight of April 14, Hayden begins the following series of posts: “Maybe it’s time to die. Let’s see if I can video record the Highway Patrol at the entrance to the Oklahoma State Capitol.” “While trying to inform them of Oath Keepers” (and links to the Oath Keepers blog). “And post it on the internet. Since i live on this sorry f_cking state,that is as good a place as ANY to die and start a WAR. WEshallsee.” “I WISH I had someone to watch my back with MY camera.” “AND, no matter WHAT happens, to post it on the internet IMMEDIATELY, AND send it to Alex Jones!!!!!!!!!!!!” (referring to radio talk show host Alex Jones). “Damnit!” “Alas… WE SHALL see the TRUTH about this sorry f_cking state!!!!!!!” After a few more posts, Dyer begins posting direct threats of violence (later removed from the Twitter account, but presented in the FBI affidavit). “The WAR wWIL start on the stepes of the Oklahoma State Capitol. I will cast the first stone. In the meantime, I await the police.” “START THE KILLING NOW! I am wiling to be the FIRST DEATH! I Await the police. They will kill me in my home.” “After I am killed on the Capitol Steps like REAL man, the rest of you will REMEMBER ME!!!” “I really don’ give a sh_t anymore. Send the cops around. I will cut their heads off the heads and throw the on the State Capitol steps.” Hayden is taken into custody before he can go to the Capitol building, and arrested for transmitting threats to kill or injure people using interstate communication tools over the Internet. FBI agent Michael Puskas confirms that Dyer posted under the moniker “CitizenQuasar,” and says Dyer also has MySpace and Blogger accounts under similar monikers. Wired magazine says it “appears to be [the] first criminal prosecution to stem from posts on the microblogging site,” and calls Dyer’s MySpace page “a breathtaking gallery of right-wing memes about the ‘New World Order,’ gun control as Nazi fascism, and Barack Obama’s covert use of television hypnosis, among many others.” Dyer will be arraigned on April 16 and ordered released to a halfway house, a move the Associated Press reports as suggesting “the magistrate judge does not consider him a genuine threat.” [Wired News, 4/24/2009; Associated Press, 4/26/2009] Posters on the conservative blog Free Republic, commenting on Hayden’s arrest, label him a “leftist” who intended to kill tea party protesters, a contention they say is proven by Hayden’s vows to seek revenge for the government’s execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995). One poster writes: “Hayden appears to be one of those mixtures of far out ideologies. On one hand he seems to support nazism but accused Obama of using mind control.” [Free Republic, 4/24/2009]

Fox News host Glenn Beck, broadcasting live from a “tea party” protest at the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, interviews Joe Horn, who was charged with shooting to death two illegal immigrants whom Horn says he caught burglarizing his neighbor’s home. The Alamo is the site of the Republic of Texas’s 1836 stand against the Mexican Army, and apparently Beck’s interview of Horn is chosen to symbolize American “resistance” to Mexican immigrants. “It’s a different world in Texas,” Beck says, and Horn replies, backed by cheers from a small audience behind Beck, “Thank God for it.” Regarding the shooting, Horn says, “I thought it was the right thing to do, and I did it.” As Beck retells the story, Horn saw the two men burglarizing the neighbor’s home, called 911, and, before the police could respond, told the 911 operator that he was going to the home to “stop them.” Defying the operator’s request not to confront the two, Horn took his shotgun to the neighbor’s home and shot both intruders, killing them. (His admission of shooting them triggers wild cheering; the Fox News cameras focus on a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag waved from the crowd.) Horn claims that the men were approaching him when he opened fire. The crowd cheers at Beck’s retelling of another story of a homeowner shooting an alleged burglar, and cheers at every subsequent mention of guns and shootings. “Joe, what kind of world are we living in that people don’t understand you have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?” Beck asks. Horn says he had no intention of “letting those two men kill me,” even though police investigations showed that he shot both of them in the back, apparently as they were fleeing, and he told the 911 operator before leaving his home, “I’m going to kill them.” Neither one of the alleged burglars was armed. Texas prosecutors failed to indict Horn. [New York Times, 12/13/2007; Media Matters, 4/15/2009]

Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, interviewing Brent Bozell of the conservative media watchdog organization Media Research Center, lets slip an admission that her network provided public relations services to the “tea party” protests that took place yesterday (see April 15, 2009, April 15, 2009 and October 13, 2009). Kelly says: “You know, Brent, it’s been interesting because Fox News covered these tea parties, and we were one of the only organizations to give it any publicity or PR prior to the fact that it happened, and it was so under-covered by virtually every news organization. Why is that? Why was it so ignored up until the very last day by virtually everyone?” Talking Points Memo reporter Brian Beutler calls Kelly’s comment “a media version what some of us like to call a Kinsley gaffe”; such a “gaffe” is defined as an instance where a politician mistakenly tells the truth. [TPMDC, 4/16/2009] Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly notes: “Fox News is ostensibly a news outlet. Obviously, it’s not a legitimate journalistic enterprise, and equally obvious was the fact that it was doing ‘public relations’ work for the conservative rallies. But Megyn Kelly isn’t supposed to admit this on the air. As for the substance of her concerns about the legitimate news organizations, Kelly is no doubt convinced that there’s a nefarious media bias at play, but it’s at least possible major outlets didn’t have much pre-event coverage because there wasn’t that much, you know, news. Most mainstream outlets didn’t feel the need to do ‘p.r.’ work for enraged partisans in advance of their protests. That’s probably a good thing.” [Washington Monthly, 4/16/2009]

Fox News talk show host Sean Hannity displays his angry support for torture and waterboarding on his show, in response to the controversy over the recently released Senate report on torture (see April 21, 2009). Hannity says: “Barack Obama is so weakening our defenses in every regard, sucking up to all the world’s dictators, that people are gonna die because of what Barack Obama is doing right now. People are going to die.” When a guest objects that Americans may die because of the Bush administration’s torture policies, and that American torture policies are “spawning terrorists,” Hannity accuses her of “blam[ing] America” for terrorism, and begins shouting: “They [terrorists] are not Americans! They are at war with us!” He then raises a football over his head and says, “Imagine this is [9/11 plotter] Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s head.” He slams it on the table and shouts: “Dunk it in water so we can save American lives! You bet!” [Media Matters, 4/22/2009]

Chyron displayed during Fox News broadcast touting Republican ‘watchdog’ efforts on Democratic spending. [Source: Media Matters]Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer tells his viewers that Fox is “keeping up” with four “interesting” projects reportedly funded by the economic stimulus act. Hemmer says that the research on the projects was done by Fox News itself. He does not tell viewers that the research, and the text and graphics displayed on-screen during his report, come directly from the Web site of Eric Cantor (R-VA), the Republican House Minority Whip. Cantor’s site lists 12 so-called “wasteful spending” projects funded by the recovery act. The four cited by Hemmer are from a section of Cantor’s site called “Washington Watch Report,” which calls itself “your one stop shop to learn about examples of government waste that have been uncovered by House Republicans.” The four projects include a skate park in Pawtucket, Rhode Island; an “art walk” in Rochester, New York; funding for a homeless project in Union, New York; and a transportation study in Ohio. Hemmer and guest Representative Mike Pence (R-IN) list each project and then criticize it. During the segment, Pence twice promotes Cantor’s Web site, and concludes by saying: “I commend you all. I commend my colleagues and the Republicans’ whip’s office with the Washington Watch Web site. People can go online and read more of these—we’re finding more everyday.” During Pence’s concluding statement, Fox News displays a “chyron” at the bottom of the screen that reads, “GOP Watchdog Exposes Wasteful State Spending of Gov’t Money” (see October 13, 2009). [Media Matters, 4/23/2009]

Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano, a former federal judge and a guest on Fox News host Glenn Beck’s broadcast, says: “How about floating a constitutional amendment amongst the states? Let’s rescind the 16th Amendment. That’s the income tax. If 25, 30 states start thinking about it and talking about it seriously, the Congress will take note because they will be scared to death it will starve them out of existence. And they won’t be able to regulate progressively or retrogressively how we live.” [Media Matters, 9/7/2010] The 16th Amendment allows Congress to collect income taxes. It was passed by Congress and submitted to the states in 1909 and ratified in 1913, both under President William Howard Taft. Recently, far-right Republicans (see 1951-1967, 1970-1972, 1976-1978, Early 1980s, and 1985) and tea party activists have begun calling for its repeal, joined by some members of Congress (see April 28, 1999). [Media Matters, 9/7/2010; Legal Information Institute, 2011]

Fox News correspondent Molly Henneberg, during a broadcast of Fox’s “straight news” show America’s Newsroom, repeats the false claim made by religious groups that the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act (LLEHCPA) would allow individuals or groups to “be prosecuted for their religious beliefs.” Some conservative religious groups have claimed that, under the proposed legislation, they could be, in Henneberg’s words, “prosecuted for their religious beliefs if they believe that homosexuality is a sin, that it could gag ministers who preach that, or even if a church may not want to marry a gay couple. There is concern that they could face lawsuits as well.” Henneberg fails to report that Section 8 of the bill says: “Nothing in this Act, or the amendments made by this Act, shall be construed to prohibit any expressive conduct protected from legal prohibition by, or any activities protected by the Constitution,” and the First Amendment to the Constitution states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The House Judiciary Committee’s report on the bill clearly states, “Nothing in this legislation would prohibit the constitutionally protected expression of one’s religious beliefs.” Henneberg does not report the committee’s finding. Later in the broadcast, anchor Bill Hemmer notes that supporters claim “there’s nothing in this law that will stymie the free expression of any religion” (see October 13, 2009). [Media Matters, 4/29/2009]

Fox News chyron accusing Democrats of voting to protect pedophiles but not veterans. [Source: Media Matters]Several Fox News anchors and commentators, along with the Fox News Web site, falsely claim that House Democrats tried to “protect” or “defend” pedophiles by voting against an amendment to the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act (LLEHCPA). The legislation defines as a federal crime specific acts of violence or attempted violence “because of the actual or perceived religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability of any person.” The amendment, advanced by Representative Steve King (R-IA), stated that “the term ‘sexual orientation’ shall not include pedophilia.” Representative Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) noted that federal statutes already exclude pedophilia from the definition of “sexual orientation,” and called King’s amendment “unnecessary and… inflammatory in terms of insinuations.” Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer, commentator Sean Hannity, and Fox Nation now characterize the Democrats’ successful opposition to King’s amendment as an attempt to “protect” or “defend” pedophiles. All three claim that Democrats defended pedophiles while refusing to defend veterans. Hannity: 'Special Category for Pedophiles' - Hannity tells his viewers, “Democrats just voted to extend special legal protections to pedophiles.” He also falsely claims that the Democrats inserted a “special category for pedophiles” in the legislation. Interviewing King, Hannity says: “I want to be perfectly clear. So hate—we have a hate crimes bill, and you’re saying, all right, we should exempt pedophiles. Every Democrat says no.” King calls Hannity’s characterization “absolutely right,” and says that “on the top of that, the amendment that I offered to exempt pedophiles from a special protected status was after Tammy Baldwin, one of the lead sponsors on the bill, had argued that the sexual orientation, special protective status in the bill, only covered heterosexuals and homosexuals, so that doesn’t include a pedophile. But she opposed the amendment anyway, as did all the Democrats, as you just showed tonight.” Later, Hannity asks King, “Is it safe to say that Democrats were willing to protect pedophiles?” and King replies: “Sean, it is a matter of Congressional record. Absolutely true—beyond any doubt whatsoever.” Hannity and King then claim that Democrats refused to support another section that would create “special protection” for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. King calls the Democrats’ actions furtherance of the “agenda… of the homosexual activists.” Hemmer: Protecting Pedophiles, Not Veterans - Fox’s “non-partisan” newscast, America’s Newsroom, runs an on-screen “chyron” that claims, “House Dems vote to protect pedophiles, but not veterans.” Anchor Bill Hemmer tells viewers that Democrats “voted to give special protection to pedophiles” (see October 13, 2009). Fox Nation: Defending Pedophiles over Veterans - Fox Nation, which claims to be free of bias, runs a headline saying, “House Democrats Defend Pedophiles Over Veterans.” [Media Matters, 5/6/2009]

Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano, a former federal judge and a guest on Fox News host Glenn Beck’s broadcast, advocates repealing the 16th Amendment, something he has done previously on Beck’s show (see April 28, 2009). Beck asks about “this solution that you and I have talked about on a constitutional amendment, or a threat of a constitutional amendment.” Napolitano replies: “If two-thirds of the states ask the Congress to call a constitutional convention to consider the adoption of this amendment, which I’ll describe in a moment, as it gets closer and closer to the two-thirds necessary and Congress would be required to call the convention, you’ll see some reaction on the part of Congress to attempt to placate the states that want to call this. Now, the constitutional amendment is a simple one. It simply abolishes the 16th Amendment and states affirmatively that Congress shall have no power to tax the personal incomes of individual persons. If that were enacted, it would starve the federal government back into the original footprint that the founders intended for it. But as it gets closer to enactment, Congress will have to do something for fear that it might be enacted.” [Glenn Beck, 5/6/2009; Media Matters, 9/7/2010] The 16th Amendment allows Congress to collect income taxes. It was passed by Congress and submitted to the states in 1909 and ratified in 1913, both under President William Howard Taft. Recently, far-right Republicans (see 1951-1967, 1970-1972, 1976-1978, Early 1980s, and 1985) and tea party activists have begun calling for its repeal, joined by some members of Congress (see April 28, 1999). [Media Matters, 9/7/2010; Legal Information Institute, 2011]

A photo from Glenn Beck’s ‘The Civilest War’ broadcast on Fox News. Beck is at far left. [Source: Fox News]Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck writes an article for Fox News promoting his upcoming special program The Civilest War, which he says is an expose of the “tyranny” of the Federal Reserve over the American economy. Beck compares the program to the popular science fiction movie The Matrix, explaining that in the movie: “Nothing was real, the world people lived in was a fabrication—a computer program. Our lives have been like that movie and it is not about Barack Obama. It’s about Obama and [George W.] Bush and [Bill] Clinton and [George H. W.] Bush. It has been going on for years, it is just a play and it goes back to the progressive movement—on both sides of the aisle. In the movie the hero is offered two pills: red to learn the truth about the Matrix; blue to go on living blissfully ignorant to what is really going on. The way to take our country back will short-circuit the Matrix we are living in. And it has to do with gun rights, state’s rights, and what I call the civilest war. It is too much to get into now—but next week take the ‘red pill’ and get the truth.” The hour-long program begins with an adaptation of the famous poem by Martin Niemoller, rewritten by Beck as follows: “I think this is the problem. First they came for the banks. I wasn’t a banker, I didn’t really care. I didn’t stand up and say anything. Then they came for the AIG executives. Then they came for the car companies. Until it gets down to you. Most people don’t see—they are coming for you at some point! You’re on the list! Everybody’s on the list. You may not be rich—as currently defined.” The show features a Utah Republican legislator accusing the federal government of imposing “tyranny” on the citizenry, neo-Confederate historian Kevin Gutzman who gives a very different explanation of the meaning of “constitutional” liberties that would abolish suffrage for women and rights for minorities, and a Montana militia member, Gary Marbut, who concludes that the most sacred rights of the US citizen are to keep and bear arms. [Fox News, 5/2009; Fox News, 5/8/2009; Crooks and Liars, 5/15/2009] Author David Neiwert, an expert on right-wing extremism, notes that the ideas Beck is promoting in The Civilest War are identical to those promulgated by far-right “Patriot” and militia movements in the 1990s, including the idea of absolute “state sovereignty” (see 1983-1995). The ultimate idea behind Beck’s proposals, Neiwert writes, is the dissolution of the federal government and the transformation of the United States into 50 independent and disparate national entities. One of the earliest proponents of Beck’s ideas, Neiwert writes, was former Colorado state legislator Charles Duke (R-CO—see May 15-21, 1996), who still has deep ties to militia and anti-government organizations in the Western states. [Crooks and Liars, 5/15/2009; Crooks and Liars, 5/15/2009]

Fox News’s Web site, Fox Nation, features a banner advertisement for May 14’s ‘Tea Party 2.0’ events. [Source: Media Matters]As it did with the April 15 “tea parties” (see April 15, 2009), Fox News actively promotes the May 14 anti-tax “tea party” protests scheduled to take place at venues around the country. The protests, dubbed “Tea Party 2.0,” are a major portion of Fox’s coverage before and during the May 14 events. On May 13, Fox News host Greta Van Susteren hosts one of the events’ highest-profile organizers, Governor Mark Sanford (R-SC), speaking on behalf of the Republican Governors Association (RGA), one of the hosts of the events. “If you wanted to go to a tea party on April 15 but could not make it or there was none in your hometown, tomorrow’s your big chance,” she says. She also asks Sanford if viewers can log on to a Web site for more information, and asks for a phone number for more information. During the interview, Fox News shows an on-screen text crawl that reads, “To sign up for Tea Party 2.0 go to: www.thegopcomeback.com” (see October 13, 2009). [Media Matters, 5/14/2009; Media Matters, 5/15/2009]

One of the billboards erected by WorldNetDaily. [Source: WorldNetDaily]The conservative news blog WorldNetDaily (WND), which has been at the forefront of the “birther” movement challenging President Obama’s citizenship (see August 1, 2008 and After, October 21, 2008, October 24, 2008, November 12, 2008 and After, and December 5, 2008), begins erecting billboards asking “Where’s the Birth Certificate?” Joseph Farah, editor and chief executive officer of WND, calls the billboard initiative “the truth and transparency campaign.” The first, a digital electronic billboard, is displayed along Highway 165 in Ball, Louisiana, and two more standard billboards are being prepared for display in Los Angeles and Pennsylvania. Farah says the “national [billboard] campaign is going to be big and long-lasting,” and uses WND to solicit donations for more billboards. Farah says he and the WND staff deliberately chose not to name Obama in the billboards: “There are several reasons we chose the message, ‘Where’s the birth certificate?’ There is only one birth certificate controversy in this country today—despite the near-total absence of this issue from coverage in the non-WND media. This is a grass-roots issue that resonates around the country, as our own online petition with nearly 400,000 signers suggests. In addition, I like the simplicity of the message. I like the fact that the message will cause some people to ask themselves or others about the meaning of the message. It will stir curiosity. It will create a buzz. I’m assuming when these billboards are springing up all over the country, it might even make some in the news media curious. And there’s one more factor that persuaded me this was the way to go. Come 2012, campaign laws will pose restrictions on political advertising mentioning the names of presidential candidates. This one clearly doesn’t. I would like to see the federal government make the case that this is somehow a political ad.” Farah blames “timid elected officials in Washington, corrupt judges around the country, and a news media that show a stunning lack of curiosity about the most basic facts of Obama’s background—especially how it relates to constitutional eligibility for the highest office in the land” for failing to investigate the “birther” controversy. Obama released his birth certificate in 2008 (see June 13, 2008), and since then it has been validated by multiple governmental and independent sources (see June 27, 2008, July 2008, August 21, 2008, and October 30, 2008). Farah, however, is not convinced, and believes the birth certificate “controversy” is part of a larger, sinister scheme by the Obama administration: “As Obama transforms this country from self-governing constitutional republic to one governed by a central ruling elite, the simple fact remains that no controlling legal authority has established that he is indeed a ‘natural born citizen’ as the Constitution requires,” he says. “Obama’s promises of transparency have become a bad joke as he continues to hide simple, innocuous documents like his birth certificate and his student records.” Farah says WND is operating as an “independent watchdog on government” by launching the billboard campaign, and not acting as a partisan organization. “I wish such a campaign were not absolutely necessary,” he says. “I wish there were checks and balances in our political and electoral systems to ensure that constitutional eligibility of presidential candidates was established before politicians could assume the highest office in the land. I wish my colleagues in the news media believed the Constitution really means what it says and pressed this issue as hard as we have pressed it at WND. I wish radio talk show hosts were bold enough to ask this question. But wishing is not enough. It’s time to raise the visibility of this issue vital to the rule of law in America. I ask everyone to pitch in and help WND make a simple yet profound statement: The Constitution still matters.” [WorldNetDaily, 5/20/2009] In November 2010, WND will erect a “birth certificate” billboard along Highway 93 near Kingman, Arizona, the small town in which Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh planned the destruction of the Murrah Federal Building (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995). Other billboards will be erected in Pennsylvania, Texas, Alabama, and Delaware. [WorldNetDaily, 11/8/2010]

Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly and ABC News correspondent Jan Crawford Greenburg misrepresent a remark by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see October 26, 2001 and May 26, 2009) that Kelly tells viewers said “Latina judges are obviously better than white male judges.” Kelly calls Sotomayor’s remarks “reverse racism,” and adds it is “[l]ike she’s saying that Latina judges are obviously better than white male judges.” Kelly goes on to claim, “I’ve looked at the entire speech that she was offering to see if that was taken out of context, and I have to tell you… it wasn’t” (see October 13, 2009). On ABC’s Good Morning America, Greenburg claims that Sotomayor “suggest[ed] that a wise Latino may actually be a better judge than a white man, and that white men have had some attitude adjustments and reached moments of great enlightenment, but there’s a long way to go.” [Media Matters, 5/26/2009]

Fox News pundit Sean Hannity attacks the character of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009), using carefully selected quotes from former colleagues who remain anonymous. Hannity tells his listeners: “[W]hat do the lawyers who have appeared in her courtroom think of her judicial temperament? Well, not much. The Almanac of the Federal Judiciary solicits commentary from practicing attorneys about our federal judges. Now here’s what some lawyers who have argued before Judge Sotomayor had to say about her. Quote, ‘She is a terror on the bench. She is overly aggressive, not very judicial. She behaves in an out-of-control manner. She is nasty to lawyers.’” Hannity does not tell his listeners of some of the other comments about Sotomayor in the Almanac: “very smart,” “very intelligent,” “stern,” “an exceptional judge overall,” and “has a very good commonsense approach to the law.” One commentator wrote: “She can be tough as nails, but, in truth, I think some lawyers give her a hard time or are threatened by her. She’s very accomplished and clearly smart, and, in truth, I think they’re intimidated. She has always been decent enough to me.” Another wrote: “She’s very smart and well prepared, and she expects lawyers to rise to her level. She has very little tolerance for lawyers who can’t match her intellectually.” [Think Progress, 5/28/2009]

Lester Kinsolving, in a photo taken during a 2007 Christmas celebration at the White House. [Source: Houston Chronicle]Journalist Lester Kinsolving, representing the conservative news blog WorldNetDaily (WND), asks White House press secretary Robert Gibbs about President Obama’s birth certificate. Obama has been hounded for well over a year with questions concerning his heritage and his citizenship. Kinsolving begins by asking: “One question concerning what the president said in his speech on Thursday, and I quote: ‘I ran for president promising transparency, and I meant what I said. This is why, whenever possible, we will make information available to the American people so they can make informed judgments and hold us accountable.’ End of quote. Do you remember that statement?” Gibbs responds, “I can confirm he said that.” Kinsolving says: “Good. In consideration of this very good promise of transparency, why can’t the president respond to the petitioned requests of 400,000 American citizens by releasing a certified copy of his long form birth certificate listing hospital and physician?” Kinsolving is referring to an online petition hosted by WND that, the site claims, has over 400,000 signatures asking for Obama’s “true” birth certificate. Gibbs tells Kinsolving that the certificate “is on the Internet, Lester” (see June 13, 2008). Kinsolving responds, “No, no, no—the long form listing his hospital and physician” (see July 1, 2009). Kinsolving is referring to the “long form” birth certificate that is by Hawaiian law kept in state vaults; only “short form” certificates are given to individuals and/or family members. Gibbs replies: “Lester.… This question in many ways continues to astound me. The state of Hawaii provided a copy, with a seal, of the president’s birth (see June 27, 2008 and August 21, 2008). I know there are apparently at least 400,000 people that continue to doubt the existence of and the certification by the state of Hawaii of the president’s birth there, but it’s on the Internet because we put it on the Internet for each of those 400,000 to download. I certainly hope by the fourth year of our administration that we’ll have dealt with this burgeoning birth controversy.” WND will respond to Gibbs’s statement by taking out an ad in the conservative publication Human Events calling Gibbs “arrogant… factually incorrect,” and a liar, and accuses other journalists in the White House press corp, “members of the liberal elitist media,” of “openly laugh[ing]” at Kinsolving’s line of inquiry. PolitiFact researcher Robert Fairley will confirm that journalists could indeed be heard “chuckling” at Kinsolving’s questions. [St. Petersburg Times, 6/17/2009; St. Petersburg Times, 7/1/2009]

US President Barack Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy review French troops during Obama’s 2009 visit to Strasburg. [Source: Shawn Thew / EPA]Jon Scott and Jane Skinner, hosts of Fox News’s “straight news” program Happening Now (see October 13, 2009), air selectively edited clips of President Obama to give the false impression that he has singled out the US for criticism during a trip to France. The segment hinges on an upcoming trip by Obama to Europe and the Middle East. Scott asks if “the president’s upcoming trip [will] be what conservatives might call another apology tour”; in teasing Scott’s segment, Skinner raises the same point. Both Scott and Skinner then air cropped clips from Obama’s April 2009 visit to France. During his April speech, Obama both praised and criticized actions taken by the US, and criticized anti-American sentiment in Europe. However, Scott and Skinner air carefully selected portions of the speech to give impetus to their contention that Obama only criticized the US during his time in France. Fellow Fox News host Sean Hannity has suggested that Obama embarked on a “blame America first” visit and “apology tour.” On-air text and graphics illustrate the “apology tour” contention. Neither Scott nor Skinner inform their audience that in the same speech, Obama criticized Europe and praised the US. Guest Elliott Abrams, the convicted Iran-Contra conspirator (see October 7, 1991), advises Obama “to stop apologizing for our country,” and adds that Obama is making a mistake in spending time talking to Muslims during the trip. [Media Matters, 6/2/2009]

Wesley Pruden, the editor emeritus of the conservative Washington Times, accuses President Obama of being “our first president without an instinctive appreciation of the culture… whence America sprang.” Pruden accuses Obama of going to Germany to apologize for America’s role in defeating that nation during World War II, says that Obama portrays himself as a Muslim while overseas, implies that Obama supports Islamic “sharia” law, claims that Obama routinely “grovels” to foreign leaders, and concludes: “Mr. Obama’s revelation of his ‘inner Muslim’ in Cairo reveals much about who he is. He is our first president without an instinctive appreciation of the culture, history, tradition, common law, and literature whence America sprang. The genetic imprint writ large in his 43 predecessors is missing from the Obama DNA. He no doubt meant no offense in returning that bust of Churchill (‘Who he?’) (see June 29, 2009).… The great Cairo grovel accomplished nothing beyond the humiliation of the president and the embarrassment of his constituents, few of whom share his need to put America on its knees before its enemies. No president before him has ever shamed us so. We must never forget it.” [Washington Times, 6/5/2009]

L.E. Ikenga, a Nigerian-American woman who has published numerous essays and articles in conservative publications, writes in the conservative blog American Thinker that President Obama holds the African-centric views of his Kenyan father, and has “adopt[ed]… a cultural and political mindset rooted in postcolonial Africa.” Ikenga writes: “[D]espite what CNN and the rest are telling you, Barack Obama is nothing more than an old school African colonial who is on his way to turning this country into one of the developing nations that you learn about on the National Geographic Channel. Many conservative (East, West, South, North) African-Americans like myself—those of us who know our history—have seen this movie before.” She accuses Obama of conducting a “masquerade” as an American who believes in democracy, when he really identifies with his Kenyan heritage and is “intrinsically undemocratic.” His true intentions are those of any “African colonial politician,” she writes: “a complete power grab whereby the ‘will of the people’ becomes completely irrelevant.” Ikenga writes that Obama is using the United States to play out his African colonial dreams of power. She bases her assertion on material drawn from his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father, which she calls “an eloquent piece of political propaganda.” In Ikenga’s reading of the book, Obama “clearly sees himself as an African, not as a black American,” which she says he proved by actually going to Kenya to visit the homeland of his father. This visit, she says, “provides the main clue for understanding Barack Obama.” She concludes by warning that “the African colonial who is given too much political power can only become one thing: a despot.” [Fresh Conservative, 2009; L.E. Ikenga, 6/25/2009] The next day, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh will read extensively from Ikenga’s article, which he calls “a special piece.” He concludes that Obama is “more African in his roots than he is American,” and declares: “[Obama] wants to turn this into a third world country.… The only way to try to do this is to just attack the private sector and deplete it of its resources, of its money, of its capital, which is exactly what he is doing.… We’ve elected somebody who is more African in his roots than he is American, loves his father who is a Marxist, and is behaving like an African colonial despot.” [Media Matters, 6/26/2009]

The bust of Winston Churchill, loaned to the White House by the British government. [Source: WorldMeets (.us)]Conservative radio host Glenn Beck tells his listeners that President Obama recently returned a bust of Winston Churchill to Great Britain because of his secret hatred of the British. Britain gave President Bush a bust of Churchill to display in the Oval Office during his term of office. In February 2009, Obama returned the bust and replaced it with a bust of President Abraham Lincoln; he added a bust of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the display. At the time, London’s Daily Telegraph reported that the bust had only been lent to the White House: according to the British Embassy, it had been “uniquely lent to a foreign head of state, President George W. Bush,” not given in perpetuity to the US government. A British Embassy spokesman told the Telegraph: “The bust of Sir Winston Churchill by Sir Jacob Epstein was uniquely lent to a foreign head of state, President George W. Bush, from the Government Art Collection in the wake of 9/11 as a signal of the strong transatlantic relationship. It was lent for the first term of office of President Bush. When the president was elected for his second and final term, the loan was extended until January 2009. The new president has decided not to continue this loan and the bust has now been returned. It is on display at the ambassador’s residence.” The White House curator, William Allman, said at the time, “It was already scheduled to go back.” However, Beck explains that Obama returned the bust because he harbors a secret hatred for the British. Beck tells his listeners that Obama’s paternal grandfather, a Kenyan, was tortured by the British during the Mau Mau Uprising in the 1950s, and that is the source of Obama’s supposed hatred. Beck presents no other evidence that Obama holds any sort of grudge or negative feelings towards the British, and ignores the fact that the Churchill bust had been slated to be returned to Britain at the end of Bush’s second term. Beck also fails to inform his listeners that Obama keeps a British treasure on his desk: a wooden penholder made from wood taken from a British sailing ship and given to him by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Instead, Beck tells his listeners: “Why does Obama harbor animosity towards the British?… A listener called me this morning. Said he had found information about Barack Obama’s grandfather in an old Irish newspaper but couldn’t verify it. I said okay, what is it? We looked into it. The information, took us about 20 minutes to find. It was out there, but until today I never heard about this information, and I’m kind of in the Barack Obama business, you know what I mean? I don’t think you have. Maybe you have. What puts you in a position to act unexplainably in weird ways toward the ally? Something must have happened in your life and maybe this is a part of it.” The news report apparently carried an account from Obama’s Kenyan step-grandmother, who told of her husband being tortured by British soldiers during the 1950s. In light of this information, Beck says it “sure makes sense” that Obama would hate the British, and adds that if it had been his grandfather who was mistreated, “I certainly wouldn’t want someone like me dealing with longtime allies.” [Daily Telegraph, 2/14/2009; Associated Press, 1/5/2010; Media Matters, 6/29/2010] Beck is echoing themes advanced by a Nigerian-American conservative in a recent Internet publication, who claimed that Obama is secretly an “African colonial” (see June 25, 2009).

Brian Kilmeade, co-host of Fox News’s morning show Fox & Friends, during a discussion of marriage practices in Sweden and Finland, says that Americans don’t have “pure genes” like Swedes because “we keep marrying other species and other ethnics.” [Media Matters, 7/8/2009; Media Matters, 7/20/2009] Two weeks later, Kilmeade will apologize for his remark, calling it “offensive to many people” and “inappropriate.” America is a “huge melting pot,” he says, “and that’s what makes us such a great country.” [Media Matters, 7/20/2009]

Author Jerome Corsi, who has made a number of disproven and debunked claims concerning President Obama’s citizenship (see August 1, 2008 and After, August 15, 2008, October 8, 2008, and October 9, 2008), now claims that he has “proof” Obama’s attendance and exemplary performance at Harvard Law School were engineered by a Saudi prince through the auspices of an African-American Muslim radical. He points to Obama’s decision not to release his college transcripts as circumstantial evidence (see September 11, 2008), saying that decision “prevents resolution of a continuing controversy over whether radical Islamic influences promoted his admission and financed his legal education there.” The “continuing controversy” centers on a lawyer named Percy Sutton, who claims that Islamic radical Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour, “one of the world’s wealthiest men,” asked him to write a letter of recommendation to Harvard Law School for then relatively unknown Barack Obama. Sutton says al-Mansour, a Saudi citizen, introduced him to Obama, and says al-Mansour was raising money for Obama to attend Harvard. Sutton says al-Mansour was a “principal adviser” to Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who, Sutton says, actually engineered Obama’s acceptance to Harvard. According to Sutton, he was told in a letter from al-Mansour: “There’s a young man that has applied to Harvard. I know that you have a few friends left there because you used to go up there to speak. Would you please write a letter in support of him?” Sutton says he did write the letter, and told friends at Harvard, “I thought there was going to be a genius that was going to be available and I certainly hoped they would treat him kindly.” The Obama campaign denied the story during the 2008 presidential campaign. Sutton, who is in his 80s and apparently suffers from some sort of senile dementia or memory loss that precludes him being contacted by Corsi or other members of the press, has made his allegations in a YouTube video that Corsi cites as his “proof.” In 2008, Politico reporter Ben Smith contacted al-Mansour, who confirmed Sutton was “a dear friend, his health is not good” and said he’s sure Sutton wrote a letter for someone else, “and he got it confused.” Corsi has requested that the White House release all of Obama’s law school records to “resolve the issue.” Al-Mansour, Corsi claims, was originally Don Warden, a member of the 1960s Black Panthers. [WorldNetDaily, 7/21/2009]

Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck says that President Obama supports health care reform as a form of “reparations” for African-Americans whose ancestors were held as slaves. Beck claims that a provision in the Congressional health care reform bill requires a medical school or other health-related institution applying for a federal grant or contract to prove its inclusiveness to minorities. Beck then tells his viewers: “[J]ust in case the universalness of the program doesn’t somehow or another quench his reparation appetite, he’s making sure to do his part to pay the debt in the other areas.… So. You got it? This isn’t preference to the best institutions that are going to be churning out our doctors, but the institutions with the most diversity. We shouldn’t be dishing out grants based on what hospital looks, you know, the most like an Old Navy commercial.… Obama is no dummy. He knows that you would never pass reparations. He knows you would never pass any of this stuff. This is all affirmative action.” On the same program, Beck and his guest, Fox contributor Linda Chavez, claim that the health care reform bill would mandate that minority patients be treated by doctors of their same race. Earlier in the day, Beck made many of the same claims about reparations on his radio show. He told his listeners: “This man [Obama] is putting through reparations times 10.… Who’d receive the money? All blacks, or just those directly descended from slaves? Would Barack Obama?… Wait a minute. His father was not a descendent of slaves, and his mother was white. So maybe Michelle Obama would be the only one that should be able to get the cash. Since Obama is half white and half black, would he pay and receive? See, these are the tricky questions, but then again, they have nothing to do with Obama’s objection to reparations. Obama is against direct reparations for one reason: He doesn’t ever want the victim card to be lost.” [Media Matters, 7/23/2009; Media Matters, 7/30/2009] Days later, Beck will accuse Obama of being a “racist” with a “deep-seated hatred of white people” (see July 28-29, 2009).

Rep. Louis Gohmert. [Source: Associated Press / Washington Blade]Representative Louis Gohmert (R-TX) lays out a skein of theories on radical radio host Alex Jones’s broadcast. During his interview with Jones, Gohmert accuses the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats of trying to implement socialism and kill senior citizens; Jones and Gohmert compare Obama to a number of foreign despots. Gohmert tells Jones and his listeners: “We’ve been battling this socialist health care, the nationalization of health care, that is going to absolutely kill senior citizens. They’ll put them on lists and force them to die early because they won’t get the treatment as early as they need.… I would rather stop this socialization of health care because once the government pays for your health care, they have every right to tell you what you eat, what you drink, how you exercise, where you live.… But if we’re going to pay 700 million dollars like we voted last Friday to put condoms on wild horses, and I know it just says an un-permanent enhanced contraception whatever the heck that is. I guess it follows that they’re eventually get around to doing it to us.” Gohmert is echoing claims by Republican lawmakers and industry lobbyists that the Democrats’ health care reform proposal will kill senior citizens (see November 23, 2008, January 27, 2009, February 9, 2009, February 11, 2009, February 18, 2009, May 13, 2009, June 24, 2009, June 25, 2009, July 10, 2009, July 16, 2009, July 17, 2009, July 21, 2009, July 23, 2009, July 23, 2009, July 23, 2009, and July 23-24, 2009). Jones ups the ante by accusing the White House “science czar” of planning to “put… stuff in the water to sterilize us,” and then goes on to accuse the White House of, among other things, implementing a “eugenics control grid over us” and implementing “youth brigades, national service compulsory in a group outside the military under the Democratic Party control in the city year in the red and black uniforms.” Gohmert agrees with Jones, and says these kinds of policies were “done in the 1930s,” a plain reference to Nazi Germany, “and it’s not the only place its been done. It has been done throughout history.” Jones says, “Mao did it,” referring to Communist China’s Mao Zedong. Gohmert agrees: “Well, that’s exactly what I was thinking of. This is the kind of the thing we got to stop. We got to get back to the roots, the basics.” Gohmert praises Jones for his rhetoric and accusations: “That shows how on top of things you are, Alex.” For his part, Jones effusively thanks Gohmert and reminds him that “you’re there fighting and we’re supporting you.” [Think Progress, 7/27/2009] Progressive MSNBC host Rachel Maddow says of Gohmert and Jones: “You know, the Democrats may be fighting it out about whether they’re going to be beholden to the insurance companies and whether there’s going to be a public option in health care reform. But when it comes to the Republicans, this is the kind of thing they are bringing to the table: Hitler, Mao, and secret plots to kill old people.” [MSNBC, 7/29/2009]

Fox News host Glenn Beck accuses President Obama of “hav[ing] real issues with race.” Beck, discussing the matter with psychiatrist and regular Fox contributor Keith Ablow, says of Obama, “I just see this ACORN [Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a citizen advocacy group accused of mismanaging funds and promoting prostitution by conservatives] thing and also the thing at the White House as a sign—this guy has real issues with race, real issues.” Ablow responds, in part, “I think we get a transparent president in this case whose feelings about white America are coming forward again.” Beck adds, “I think he’s one of the more arrogant people I have ever witnessed in the office.” [Media Matters, 7/27/2009] During the same broadcast, Beck says: “We have demonstrated President Obama’s desire for racial justice, but how is he setting out to achieve it? Exactly the way a community organizer would: through intimidation, vilification, bullying, a system, an underground shell game.” [Media Matters, 7/27/2009] The next day, Beck will accuse Obama of being a “racist” with a “deep-seated hatred of white people” (see July 28-29, 2009).

Fox News actively promotes the September 12, 2009 march on Washington, the central focus of Fox host Glenn Beck’s “9/12 Project” (see March 13, 2009 and After). Beck and Fox News have promoted the event before now, and will continue doing so, as a “nonpartisan” rally that is not “about parties or politics or the president.” However, the Fox promotions routinely feature attacks on Democratic lawmakers (see October 13, 2009). One of the organizing groups for the rally, the Tea Party Express, provides a list of 28 congressmen and women, all Democrats, targeted for defeat in 2010, “who have betrayed their constituents by pushing through massive deficits, higher taxes, and government intervention into the private sector and private lives of American families.” One of the organization’s funders, the Our Country Deserves Better political action committee (OCDBPAC), was created to promote Republican candidates and oppose the Obama administration’s agenda. In 2008, OCDBPAC stated that its only objective was “to defeat [Barack] Obama,” and hosted numerous rallies for Republican candidates John McCain and Sarah Palin. OCDBPAC’s vice chairman Mark Williams has frequently challenged Obama’s citizenship, calling him a “Kenyan” by birth, and once called Obama “the former Barry Soetoro (see October 8-10, 2008), Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug turned anointed.” [Media Matters, 7/29/2009]

Gregg Jarrett, guest host of Fox News’s “straight news” broadcast The Live Desk (see October 13, 2009), tells viewers that the Obama Justice Department “thinks it’s okay to intimidate white people, not okay to intimidate black people at the polls.” Jarrett and others are discussing the Justice Department’s decision to dismiss a case against the New Black Panthers, who had been accused of intimidating white voters during the November 2008 elections. Jarrett interviews Washington Times editor John Solomon, whose paper implied, without proof, that the decision to drop the case may have come from “senior elected or politically appointed” White House officials and not from career prosecutors who felt the case lacked merit, as the Justice Department says. Solomon says that during the Bush administration, Congressional Democrats “very strongly raised questions about the politicization of the Justice Department—political people, or career people answering to political people, overruling the front lines of the Justice Department, and this fits that debate right now in the Justice Department. And I think Congress, the Republicans and some Democrats, are asking questions now about whether career people got their say here and whether they were really listened to, or whether some other agenda had been carried out.” Jarrett then notes: “Well, the other message may be that this is a Department of Justice who thinks it’s okay to intimidate white people, not okay to intimidate black people at the polls. That could be one conclusion that people may reach here by their decision.” [Media Matters, 7/30/2009]

The fraudulent birth certificate presented by California lawyer Orly Taitz ‘proving’ that Barack Obama was born in a Kenyan hospital. [Source: Snopes (.com)]California attorney Orly Taitz posts an image of what she says is President Obama’s “true” birth certificate, this one issued in Kenya (see June 13, 2008). Taitz then files a motion in federal court to prove its authenticity. The conservative news blog WorldNetDaily (WND) quickly publishes an article repeating Taitz’s claim. WND notes that the Kenyan document lists Obama’s parents as “Barack Hussein Obama and Stanley Ann Obama, formerly Stanley Ann Dunham.” The birth date is August 4, 1961, and the hospital of birth is Coast General Hospital in Mombasa, Kenya. The document lists no attending doctor. It does list the signature of the deputy registrar of Coast Province, Joshua Simon Oduya. According to the document, it was issued as a certified copy of the original in February 1964. WND claims that it has compared the Taitz document to other Kenyan birth certificates, and, it concludes, “the form of the documents appear to be identical.” WND admits that other fraudulent Kenyan birth certificates have recently been posted on the Internet, but, it says, “[t]he new document released by Taitz bears none of the obvious traits of a hoax.” Critics note that the Taitz document was certified as being issued by the Republic of Kenya on February 17, 1964, though the Republic of Kenya did not come into existence until December 1964. However, WND says, “Kenya’s official independence was in 1963, and any number of labels could have been applied to government documents during that time period.” According to WND, Taitz says she received the document “from an anonymous source who doesn’t want his name known because ‘he’s afraid for his life.’” Taitz’s court filing, in the US District Court for the Central District of California, requests the purported evidence of Obama’s birth—both the alleged birth certificate and foreign records not yet obtained—be preserved from destruction, asks for permission to legally request documents from Kenya, and seeks a subpoena for deposition from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Taitz tells WND: “I filed the motion with the court asking for expedited discovery, which would allow me to start subpoenas and depositions even before Obama and the government responds. I am asking the judge to give me the power to subpoena the documents from the Kenyan embassy and to require a deposition from Hillary Clinton so they will be forced to authenticate [the birth certificate]. I’m forcing the issue, where Obama will have to respond.… Before, they said, ‘You don’t have anything backing your claims.’ Now I have something. In fact, I have posted on the Internet more than Obama has (see June 13, 2008). My birth certificate actually has signatures.” Taitz says she plans to file more documents with the court in the following days. [St. Petersburg Times, 8/2/2009; WorldNetDaily, 8/2/2009]Forgery - PolitiFact, the nonpartisan, political fact-checking organization sponsored by the St. Petersburg Times, asks for clarification from Salim Lone, the spokesman for Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga. Lone says via email: “It’s a forgery. Kenya only became a republic in December, 1964. Other arguments could also be marshaled, but they are not needed.” Blogger Steve Eddy then finds a nearly-identical document on the Internet using Google Search, posted on a genealogy Web site by an Australian, David Jeffrey Bomford. Eddy compares the two and, according to PolitiFact: “Same format. Same book and page number in the birth registry. Some of the officials’ last names were even the same.” Eddy tells PolitiFact, “At that point, it was pretty obvious the Kenyan one was a fake, that someone had used this real one from Australia to make their version.” An ABC affiliate in Australia asks Bomford, a public service clerk in Adelaide, about the controversy, and Bomford replies: “That is ridiculous. Little old person in Adelaide, the president of the United States. I don’t know whether to laugh about it or not, be worried about it.” Bomford says he had nothing to do with the hoax. “It’s little old me and my mum and everything else up there,” he says. The birth certificate he posted online is his own, he says. “Oh, I definitely confirm that the birth certificate was mine. That was quite easy to see—my address, even the style of the birth certificate was an old South Australian one. So it’s quite easy to identify that it’s mine.… It’s definitely a copy of my certificate. It’s so laughable it’s ridiculous.” [St. Petersburg Times, 8/2/2009] The Washington Independent’s David Weigel notes , “The image is part of the extremely ill-informed conspiracy theory that Obama was born in Mombasa—conveniently, one of the more Muslim parts of the country.” The Obama family lives in an entirely different part of Kenya, over a thousand miles from Mombasa. Moreover, at the time of Obama’s birth, Mombasa was not a part of Kenya, but part of Zanzibar. [Washington Independent, 8/3/2009]Rebuttal - Taitz posts on her Web site that Bomford’s certificate, not her own, is the fake, and says Bomford or someone else altered that certificate from the “original” Obama certificate to discredit her. Eddy says of Taitz’s claim, “There’s no reasoning with some of these people.” A blogger from “Obama Not Qualified” writes a long screed detailing his or her belief that the Taitz document is real, though noting his or her belief that the photo Taitz originally posted may not be real, and giving a step-by-step walkthrough of how to create a falsified document. PolitiFact receives a response from Val Edyvean, registrar of births, deaths and marriages for South Australia, saying: “It appears that a South Australian loaded an image of his own birth certificate onto a family history Web site and that the format was used by others to ‘create’ a document which purported to be a Kenyan birth certificate for Barack Obama. As the South Australian man has now removed this image, and the date of his birth is in the period of certificates which are restricted from public access, I do not intend to add to speculation by commenting on details of either that certificate or any aspects of it.” [Obama Not Qualified, 2008; St. Petersburg Times, 8/2/2009]Conclusion - WND publisher Joseph Farah publishes a column expressing his feeling that the Taitz certificate is “probably” a forgery, and claims that WND never made any assertion of its validity. (Farah also says that the State of Hawaii has “steadfastly refused” to state that the birth certificate posted by the Obama campaign in 2008 is valid, a false statement—see October 30, 2008 and July 28, 2009). “The Kenyan document could be real. I haven’t seen a single disqualifying error pointed out in the last 24 hours. But I still strongly suspect it is not,” he writes. Instead, he says, WND posted the certificate and the accompanying article so that it could be fact-checked. He then claims that Obama has “hidden” his real birth certificate and “virtually every other meaningful document in his life” from public scrutiny. [WorldNetDaily, 8/4/2009] PolitiFact concludes that the Taitz certificate “is a fake.” However, “we have no delusions this changes anyone’s mind in the birther movement.” [St. Petersburg Times, 8/2/2009]

The logo used for the Obama administration’s health care proposal on the White House Web site. The logo combines the Obama presidential campaign’s ‘sunrise’ emblem with a stylized version of the medical caduceus. [Source: White House]After denouncing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for claiming that anti-health care protesters had used Nazi symbols and rhetoric in their protests (see August 6, 2009), conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh also makes a comparison between the Obama administration and Nazis. “Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate,” he says. Like Obama, Limbaugh asserts, Hitler “was called the Messiah” and did not need the advice of a cabinet or other advisers to make decisions. “The people spoke through” Hitler, as Limbaugh says Obama believes is the case for himself. Hitler’s decisions “sound like the things liberals are doing all over this country.” To Pelosi, he says, “You look much more like [a swastika] than any of us [conservatives] ever will.” [Media Matters, 8/6/2009; Boston Globe, 8/6/2009] Limbaugh also says that the Obama administration’s health care logo looks very much like the “Nazi swastika logo.” He adds: “It reminded me of Germany. Something about it reminded me of Germany, 1942. The shape of the logo, the people.… The Obama health care logo is damn close to a Nazi swastika logo.… Ms. Pelosi has some major apologizing to do.” He says perhaps Pelosi’s supposed “repeated botox injections” have caused her to have “blurry vision” that may have prevented her from seeing the similarities he noticed. [Media Matters, 8/6/2009; Boston Globe, 8/6/2009] Limbaugh apparently gets much of his information, including the Botox joke, from a right-wing blog, “Sweetness and Light,” which he credits in his statement. [Sweetness and Light, 8/6/2009] The next day, Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center says, “It is preposterous to try and make a connection between the president’s health care logo and the Nazi Party symbol, the Reichsadler.” [New York Times, 8/7/2009] Jennifer Crider of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) responds to Limbaugh’s assertions: “Rush Limbaugh’s comparison of the Democratic Party to the Nazi Party in World War II is as disgusting as it is shocking. Limbaugh’s use of the Nazi swastika in attempting to make a tasteless political comparison has no place in the public discourse. At a time when families need real solutions to rebuild the economy and make health care more affordable, Rush Limbaugh is attempting to sidetrack the important debate through his use of symbols that are synonymous with murder and intolerance. Americans deserve better.” [Boston Globe, 8/6/2009] Conservative columnist David Brooks of the New York Times calls Limbaugh’s rhetoric “insane.” [Media Matters, 8/10/2009]

Conservative Fox News and radio talk show host Sean Hannity urges fellow conservatives to turn out in force at town halls in their area to protest health care reform. On his Web site, Hannity urges protesters to “Become a part of the mob! Attend an Obama Care Townhall near you!” Hannity’s site lists a number of town halls; at the bottom of the page, he credits the “Astroturf” lobbying group Conservatives for Patients Rights (see August 4, 2009) as the source of the list. [Sean Hannity, 8/2009; New York Times, 8/7/2009]

Eric Boehlert. [Source: Simon & Schuster]Eric Boehlert, an author and editor of the progressive news watchdog organization Media Matters, writes that, in his eyes, the media is ignoring the biggest “political story of the year”: “the unhinged radical-right response to [President] Obama’s inauguration and the naked attempt to dehumanize and delegitimize him through a nonstop smear campaign,” which he says is sponsored by the Republican Party and its conservative supporters. “The misguided movement breaks all kinds of taboos in American politics,” Boehlert writes, “as well as in the press, and is redefining our political culture—for the worse. Yet the press continues to play dumb.” Playing the Nazi Card - Boehlert takes as his springboard the relative disinterest the mainstream media shows to the repeated accusations that Obama and/or Congressional Democrats are Nazis, or Nazi sympathizers, or have Nazi-like goals and ideals (see July 24, 2009, July 28, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 6, 2009, August 6, 2009, August 6, 2009, August 7, 2009, and August 10-11, 2009), as well as the virtually unreported use of Nazi symbols and rhetoric at anti-health care protests (see July 25, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 4, 2009, and August 8, 2009). Boehlert notes that in January 2004, the liberal advocacy organization MoveOn received weeks of negative publicity and media attention when it briefly posted two amateur video clips on its Web site submitted as part of a contest for 30-second Internet advertisements against the policies of the Bush administration. The organization removed the clips within hours and apologized for posting them, but was berated for weeks over the ads. Now, Boehlert notes, Rush Limbaugh and other prominent conservative spokespersons routinely use accusations of Nazism in their rhetorical attacks on Obama and Democrats, with virtually no acknowledgement from the press. Boehlert writes: “Despite the fact that Limbaugh has not apologized for his comments—unlike MoveOn in 2004—and is continuing to compare the Obama White House and the Democratic Party with Nazis, many in the media don’t consider it newsworthy and haven’t condemned it. And more important, journalists don’t show any signs of believing that the episode tells us anything about the radically unhinged nature of the right-wing media in this country today.” Apparently, he writes, most media analysts just consider Limbaugh’s extreme rhetoric a case of “Rush being Rush.” But, he asks, if Limbaugh is going to be considered the de facto leader of conservative thought in America, why isn’t he being challenged on his use of what Boehlert calls “his radical and outrageous rhetoric.… He went to a place that previously was considered unconscionable and unpardonable by the press.… Why isn’t Limbaugh uniformly condemned for his words?” Accusations of Racism, Racist Pronouncements - And Limbaugh is merely one of many. Fox News commentator Glenn Beck recently accused Obama of being a “racist” and having a “deep-seated hatred of white people” (see July 28-29, 2009), and outside of the small number of progressive/liberal hosts on MSNBC and a few scattered notations in the press, the accusation was virtually ignored. “At the [Washington] Post, which obsesses over the intersection of the media and politics,” Boehlert writes, “the jaw-dropping attack by Fox News’s superstar host wasn’t considered newsworthy. That’s correct: Two of the most popular and powerful conservative voices in America have recently called out Obama as a Nazi and a racist.” Legitimizing Extremism - Boehlert assigns part of the blame to journalists being “spooked by decades’ worth of ‘liberal media bias’ attacks” that drive them to “refuse to connect the glaringly obvious dots on display.” The extreme rhetorical attacks dovetail with what he calls “the town hall mini-mobs that are wreaking havoc across the country” and “the bizarre birther conspiracy theory” that insists Obama is not a US citizen, but some sort of “plant” from Kenya brought to America to bring down American democracy. “The three right-wing phenomena are all related,” he writes, “and they all revolve around a runaway hatred of Obama (as well as the federal government), and they’re all being fueled by the [conservative media operation], especially Fox News and Limbaugh, both of which no longer recognize common decency, let alone journalistic standards. Yet instead of putting Limbaugh on the receiving end of well-deserved scrutiny and scorn, rather than turning his comments into a political firestorm, the press plays dumb and actually goes out of its way to legitimize the worst offenders of the GOP’s hate brigade.” Boehlert condemns ABC News for inviting conservative blogger and columnist Michelle Malkin to take part in a discussion of health care reform “with Pulitzer Prize-winning writers.” Malkin, he writes, is a prime member of the “hate brigade,” helping push the increasingly angry and violent mob confrontations as well as exhorting readers to believe that the Democrats want to exterminate the elderly (see November 23, 2008, January 27, 2009, February 9, 2009, February 11, 2009, February 18, 2009, May 13, 2009, June 24, 2009, June 25, 2009, July 10, 2009, July 16, 2009, July 17, 2009, July 21, 2009, July 23, 2009, July 23, 2009, July 23, 2009, July 23-24, 2009, July 24, 2009, July 28, 2009, July 28, 2009, July 28, 2009, July 31, 2009 - August 12, 2009, August 7, 2009, and August 10, 2009). The New Yorker recently praised Michael Savage, who routinely attacks women, gays, liberals, and minorities with the worst rhetorical excess (see January 10, 2008, February 1, 2008, February 21, 2008, March 13, 2008, April 3, 2008, June 6, 2008, June 6, 2008, August 25, 2008, October 8-10, 2008, October 21, 2008, October 22, 2008, November 10, 2008, and November 18, 2008), calling him “fun” and “addictive.” Comparing the Statistics - Boehlert notes that in January 2004, the Indianapolis Star published five letters to the editor about the MoveOn controversy. To date, it has not published a single letter about Limbaugh’s Nazi accusations towards Obama or Democrats. In January 2004, 28 of the nation’s largest newspapers published a total of 54 stories, articles, or letters about the MoveOn controversy. To date, that group has published a combined total of six stories about Limbaugh’s Nazi allegations. No paper has printed more than one story on the topic. In January 2004, the MoveOn-Nazi story garnered 300 percent more airtime on CNN than the Limbaugh-Nazi story has received. [Media Matters, 8/11/2009]

Eric Bolling, a host on Fox Business Channel, appears as a guest on Fox News’s The Live Desk, where he attacks Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme.” Bolling explains that a lack of increase in July’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) means that Social Security benefits also fail to increase, but then shifts into a claim that Social Security is “underfunded or almost unfunded.… People are paying into Social Security. That money’s being used to pay for seniors right now, so, it’s kinda like a Ponzi scheme.… They should rename it the Madoff Social Security system, because down the road, there’s not going to be enough money.” Bolling is making reference to Wall Street financier Bernie Madoff, who stole billions of dollars from clients through a web of fraudulent schemes. [Media Matters, 8/14/2009; Media Matters, 9/7/2010] In February, the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore made a similar claim (see February 2, 2009). And an Associated Press reporter made a similar claim two days before Bolling (see August 12-16, 2009).

Fox News television banner promoting its coverage of the ‘Tea Party Express’ bus tour. [Source: Media Matters]Fox News gives in-depth coverage to the “Tea Party Express,” a bus tour organized by the Republican political action committee Our Country Deserves Better (OCDBPAC), whose stated mission is to oppose the Obama administration’s policy initiatives. Fox has previously promoted and covered other “tea party” protests (see April 15, 2009 and May 13-14, 2009). The network covers the kickoff of the tour, after over a month of extensive promotion on Fox News, Fox Business, the “Fox Nation” Web site, and FoxNews.com (see October 13, 2009). OCDBPAC used Fox’s promotion of the tour in its own fundraising efforts. Fox has hosted OCDBPAC vice chairman and “Tea Party Express” organizer Mark Williams, who has publicly stated his disbelief that President Obama is an American citizen, has expressed his belief in the so-called “death panels” connected to the health care reform legislation being crafted in Congress (see August 7, 2009), and has compared Obama to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Fox News provides viewers with information telling them “how you can join” the tour by noting the dates and locations of 22 tour stops, with anchors encouraging viewers to “be a part” of the tour. Fox News talk show host Sean Hannity joins the tour for the day, and broadcasts “live updates” from the bus. Reporter Griff Jenkins is assigned to cover the tour for a number of days, and will provide segments for broadcast periodically throughout the tour. Another Fox reporter, William La Jeunesse, reports from the Sacramento kickoff, and tells his audience, “[H]opefully Washington will listen to [the protesters’] concerns.” In a kickoff-day interview, Williams tells La Jeunesse that the purpose of the tour is to revive the Republican Party, which he says is “right now in a coma.” [Media Matters, 8/28/2009]

Conservative radio and Fox News television host Glenn Beck exhorts his radio audience to take part in the “massive” demonstration planned for September 12 as part of his “9/12 Project” (see March 13, 2009 and After). “I’m telling you, they [liberals, Democrats, and the Obama administration] have their hands around the neck of the republic,” he warns his listeners. “They are much farther ahead. We are just figuring it out. They have their hands around the neck of this republic and they are about to snap it.” He tells his audience to “get on your knees and pray, turn the other cheek, never in anger, never in anger, pray for more time, stand up in your community, and speak without fear.… You are the guardian and protector of liberty. You may be the only thing that stands between freedom and slavery. And if you can, join those who are willing to take a stand, on Washington, DC, on 9/12. If not, stand together, somewhere in your community, on 9/12. Get involved. They’re very well organized in their communities. And I didn’t realize how many socialist communities there were.” [Media Matters, 9/1/2009]

Fox News producer Heidi Noonan exhorting a 9/12 rally crowd. [Source: Huffington Post]Fox News footage taken at the 9/12 rally in Washington (see September 12, 2009) shows a Fox News producer exhorting a crowd to shout, cheer, and show enthusiasm while Fox cameras film them. Fox producer Heidi Noonan stands behind reporter Griff Jenkins exhorting the crowd during Jenkins’s on-air segment. Fox News bureau chief Bryan Boughton later says, “The employee [Noonan] is a young, relatively inexperienced associate producer who realizes she made a mistake and has been disciplined.” Noonan is also seen standing near a rally participant who is holding a poster reading, “I’m A Foxaholic” (see October 13, 2009). [Huffington Post, 9/19/2009; Mediaite, 9/20/2009] On September 21, 2009, Fox News vice president Bill Sammon sends an internal e-mail reminding Fox staffers that they report the news, not create it. He writes in part: “For those of us who have only been at Fox for a relatively short period of time, it’s useful to remind ourselves that, as journalists, we must always be careful to cover the story without becoming part of the story. At news events, we’re supposed to function as dispassionate observers, not active participants. We are there to chronicle the news, not create it.… We do not cheerlead for one cause or another. We do not rile up a crowd. If a crowd happens to be boisterous when we show it on TV, so be it. If it happens to be quiet, that’s fine, too. It’s not our job to affect the crowd’s behavior one way or the other. Again, we’re journalists, not participants—and certainly not performers. Indeed, any effort to affect the crowd’s behavior only serves to undermine our legitimate journalistic role as detached eyewitnesses. Remember, our viewers are counting on us to be honest brokers when it comes to reporting—not altering—the important events of the day. That is nothing less than a sacred trust. We must always take pains to preserve that trust.” [Mediaite, 9/21/2009]

Former Bush administration official Ellen Sauerbrey (see October 11, 2005) tells a group of Maryland Republicans that President Obama is advancing socialist and fascist policies. Sauerbrey addresses a group of local Republicans in Callaway, Maryland. According to Sauerbrey, Obama has surrounded himself with cult-like, fanatical followers much as Adolf Hitler or Argentina’s Juan Peron did when they ruled their countries. While she says she is not comparing Obama to either of those leaders, she says that conditions in America make the time ripe for Obama to usurp dictator-like powers. Obama is advancing “fascist, socialist ideals,” she says, and adds: “I’m really afraid for the future of our country. Our Constitution is indeed being dismantled.” In an interview shortly after her address, Sauerbrey says she had issues with some of the Bush administration’s economic policies as well: “[W]hen you start down this road of these kinds of policies, you are on the road to destroying what has made this a great country.” As for the comparisons to Hitler and Peron, she later tells an interviewer: “I never mentioned Hitler’s name other than when the reporter came up to me afterwards. And I said, look, I am not making a direct comparison Obama and Hitler. I’m making a comparison between policies in countries, and that history has a way of repeating itself.” To the interviewer, Sauerbrey denies accusing Obama of being a fascist, though in her address she did accuse him of advancing “fascist, socialist ideals.” Instead, she says: “I’m saying, if you said ideals—yes I do believe, when you look at the definition of fascism. Fascism is not government ownership of business, it is government control of business.… I think that the definition of what the Obama administration is doing, from an economic definition standpoint, is much more closely described as fascism than socialism, because the government is not owning, it is directing and controlling the elements of the economy. Would you disagree with it?” [TPMDC, 9/17/2009; Think Progress, 9/18/2009]

Portion of Fox News ad asking why other networks ‘missed’ the story of the 9/12 rally. [Source: Huffington Post]Fox News takes out a full-page ad in the Washington Post demanding why other news networks did not cover the 9/12 rally (see September 12, 2009). “How did, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, and CNN miss this story?” the text reads. Huffington Post columnist Jason Linkins writes that it took him “all of 30 seconds” to find coverage on CNN and MSNBC. He writes that on September 12, “CNN ran no less than 14 reports on the Tea Party rally, beginning at approximately 7:00 a.m. During the same time period, MSNBC offered viewers four reports on the Tea Parties.” NBC, CBS, and ABC also covered the rally. “No one missed the story,” Linkins concludes. He goes on to note that ABC was the news network that debunked attempts to inflate the crowd numbers to make the rally seem larger than it really was (see September 13-14, 2009). [Huffington Post, 9/18/2009] This afternoon, CNN anchor Rick Sanchez declares of the ad, “You lie!” Fox News defends the ad, with its vice president Michael Tammero issuing a statement that says in part, “Generally speaking, it’s fair to say that from the tea party movement… to the march on 9/12, the networks either ignored the story, marginalized it, or misrepresented the significance of it altogether.” A Fox News executive calls Sanchez a “sucker” and “a gift that keeps on giving” for his on-air reaction. CNN retorts in its own statement: “Fox News’ ad today is blatantly false regarding CNN’s coverage of the 9/12 rally. CNN provided live coverage of the rally in Washington throughout the day Saturday, Sept. 12. CNN dispatched more than a dozen personnel and multiple camera crews, including the CNN Express, to cover the event. CNN’s deputy political director Paul Steinhauser was live at Freedom Plaza, CNN correspondent Kate Bolduan live from the West Front of the Capitol and roved the crowd, CNN’s Jim Spellman provided live hits all day after traveling for weeks on the actual Tea Party Express, and CNN’s Lisa Desjardins was live from the National Mall.” [Mediaite, 9/18/2009]

Fox News host Glenn Beck, in an interview with the conservative Web news provider NewsMax, says he “fears a Reichstag moment” from the Obama administration. Beck is referring to the 1933 burning of the German parliament building in Berlin that the Nazis blamed on Communists, and that Adolf Hitler used as an excuse to eliminate constitutional liberties and consolidate power. Beck says he “fears” that the Obama administration will either orchestrate, or take advantage of, a similar situation in America to abolish constitutional democracy and institute a tyrannical rule. “I fear a Reichstag moment,” he says. “God forbid, another 9/11. Something that will turn this machine on, and power will be seized and voices will be silenced. God help us all.” The NewsMax article will subsequently be removed from the provider’s Web site, but the progressive media watchdog organization Media Matters writes an article about the interview, as do several other news organizations. [Media Matters, 9/30/2009; Chicago Tribune, 10/6/2009]

Conservative lobbyists cheer the IOC’s decision not to give the 2016 Olympics to Chicago. [Source: MSNBC / Towleroad (.com)]While many Americans are shocked and upset by the decision of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) not to award the 2016 Olympics to Chicago (see October 2, 2009), some conservatives cheer the decision as a personal defeat for President Obama, who spoke to the IOC on Chicago’s behalf. The conservative Web site Drudge Report blasts a large headline: “THE EGO HAS LANDED; WORLD REJECTS OBAMA: CHICAGO OUT IN FIRST ROUND.” [Huffington Post, 10/2/2009] A gathering of conservative lobbyists and officials at Americans for Prosperity erupts in cheering and applause when the news of Chicago’s loss is announced; the video of the reaction quickly makes the rounds of cable news and Internet outlets. [National Journal, 10/2/2009] Conservative blogger Erick Erickson of RedState.com, one of the right’s most influential Internet commentators, celebrates the loss: “Hahahahaha,” he posts. “I thought the world would love us more now that Bush was gone. I thought if we whored ourselves out to our enemies, great things would happen. Apparently not. So Obama’s pimped us to every two-bit thug and dictator in the world, made promises to half the Olympic committee, and they did not even kiss him.” [Erick Erickson, 10/2/2009] Fellow conservative blogger Michelle Malkin writes that the IOC decision effectively ends the Obama campaign motto of “Yes We Can” by introducing a new slogan: “No, You Can’t.” Malkin continues: “Like Icarus, President Obama’s giddy ego flight has ended with melted wax and fallen wings. This is a big win and a massive relief for taxpayers. But Chicago cronies are not going to take this well. Gird your loins. Who will be first to cry RAAAAAACIST?” [Michelle Malkin, 10/2/2009] The National Review calls the decision an “embarrassment for Obama,” and adds, “If he can’t work his personal magic with the Olympians, why does he expect it to work with the Iranians?” [National Review, 10/2/2009] Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh gleefully echoes Drudge’s “the ego has landed” headline, and says the decision makes this “the worst day of [Obama’s] presidency.” He claims that Obama “has failed.… We’ve got a two-year-old manchild with a Mars-sized ego, which today crashed and burned.” The loss of the Olympics is a direct reflection of Obama’s foreign policy, Limbaugh claims: “Our president, Barack Hussein Obama, has been running around the world for nine months telling everybody how much our country sucks.… Why would anybody award the Olympics to such a crappy place?… This is a moment of weakness, and weakness invites trouble. You think I’m laughing? What do you think’s happening in Tehran?” And he says, in apparent jest, “Who knew the Olympic Committee was a bunch of racists?” [ABC News, 10/2/2009] The Huffington Post counters that “if Democrats had attacked [former President] George W. Bush for pushing Dallas as an Olympics host, they would immediately have been branded as unpatriotic.” [Huffington Post, 10/2/2009]

White House communications director Anita Dunn says that the White House believes Fox News is not a traditional, non-partisan news provider, but a media outlet for the Republican opposition. Fox News is “a wing of the Republican Party,” Dunn says. “They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.” Dunn continues: “[W]e’re not going to legitimize them as a news organization.… We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent. As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.” [Time, 10/8/2009; New York Times, 10/11/2009; Fox News, 10/12/2009] In late September, Dunn told a reporter: “It’s opinion journalism masquerading as news. They are boosting their audience. But that doesn’t mean we are going to sit back.” [Time, 9/30/2009] Fox News retorts that its news reporting segments, which its vice president Michael Clemente defines as being broadcast between “9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. on weekdays,” are non-partisan, and criticism of the White House and Congressional Democrats is limited to commentary by on-air personalities such as Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck (see October 13, 2009). “The average consumer certainly knows the difference between the A section of the newspaper and the editorial page,” Clemente says, and adds that the White House is intentionally conflating Fox’s news programs with its opinion shows: “It’s astounding the White House cannot distinguish between news and opinion programming. It seems self-serving on their part.… Instead of governing, the White House continues to be in campaign mode, and Fox News is the target of their attack mentality. Perhaps the energy would be better spent on the critical issues that voters are worried about.” Another Fox News vice president, Bill Shine, welcomes the criticism, saying, “Every time they do it, our ratings go up.” Fox News has recently hired more outspoken conservative media figures, including former ABC News reporter John Stossel for its spin-off channel, Fox Business, and is reputedly negotiating to hire commentator Lou Dobbs away from CNN. Dunn and others say that it will not ostracize Fox News, and its White House correspondent, Major Garrett, will continue to be welcome at White House press conferences. Clemente has instructed Garrett, news anchor Shepard Smith, and other Fox reporters not to appear on some of its commentary programs. However, the White House has limited appearances by its members on Fox News shows; in mid-September, when President Obama made the rounds of Sunday morning talk shows, he skipped Fox, and the White House called Fox an “ideological outlet” instead of a legitimate news provider (see September 18-19, 2009). White House advisers note that in the past, Fox News hosts have falsely accused Obama of attending an Islamic “madrassa” to receive indoctrination in radical Islam (see January 22-24, 2008), promoted “tea party” rallies against the government (see March 23-24, 2009, April 6-7, 2009, April 6-13, 2009, April 13-15, 2009, April 15, 2009, April 15, 2009, April 16, 2009, May 13-14, 2009, July 28, 2009, and August 28, 2009), called Obama “unpatriotic” for attempting to land the 2016 Olympics for the US (see October 2, 2009), and led a push to force low-level White House adviser Van Jones out of his job (including accusations from Beck that Jones was a “communist-anarchist radical”). The White House notes that Beck and other Fox commentators regularly lie about the day’s events, and cites a recent example where Beck complained that Garrett was “never called on” at White House press briefings, when Garrett had asked a question of the president that same day. Beck has repeatedly called Obama a “racist,” leading to a boycott of advertisers for Beck’s show (see July 28-29, 2009). [Time, 10/8/2009; New York Times, 10/11/2009; Media Bistro, 10/11/2009] Fox News encourages and promotes the dispute with the White House, and its ratings improve. Later, a Fox News executive tells Clemente that the White House’s attacks were like “a hanging curveball” for the network. [New York Magazine, 5/22/2011]

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